Your post, @ladyrebecca, offers us some very interesting information. Although the hypothesis that the first settlers of America came from Asia, through the Bering Strait, as far as I know, continues to be reviewed, the phenotypic resemblance seems to point to it.
You use a very appropriate word to refer to the damage caused to this population by the Soviet communist "plague".
Although we would like these ancient cultures to survive, modern civilization ends up ravaging them through plunder or assimilation, most of the time involuntarily or uncritically. Just as you present what researcher Vajda collected regarding the extinction of kets shamanism, in a similar way it has been happening in the American indigenous cultures. Several years ago, a friend, Jean-Marc de Civrieux, a researcher of aboriginal cultures, of French origin, residing in Venezuela, invited me to accompany him to collect the testimony of the last shaman of the chaima ethnicity, already old and sick (unfortunately I could not go). It seems that this is the destiny of this knowledge, which survives if someone picks it up. I suppose that has been the work of the American researcher mentioned.
Grateful for your article, @ladyrebecca.