This article's lead section contains information that is not included elsewhere in the article.(May 2022) |
Total population | |
---|---|
6,273 alone and in combination [1] (2010) | |
Regions with significant populations | |
United States ( California) | |
Languages | |
English, Yokuts language [2] | |
Religion | |
traditional tribal religion, Christianity, Kuksu religion, [3] previously Ghost Dance [3] | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Maidu, Miwok, Ohlone, and Wintu peoples |
The Yokuts (previously known as Mariposas [4] ) are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages. Yokuts is both plural and singular; Yokut, while common, is erroneous. [5] 'Yokut' should only be used when referring specifically to the Tachi Yokut Tribe of Lemoore. Some of their descendants prefer to refer to themselves by their respective tribal names; they reject the term Yokuts, saying that it is an exonym invented by English-speaking settlers and historians. Conventional sub-groupings include the Foothill Yokuts, Northern Valley Yokuts, and Southern Valley Yokuts. [6]
Another name used to refer to the Yokuts was Mariposans. [7] The endonym "Yokuts" itself means "people." [8] There are many stories, depending on the tribe, on how the Yokuts and their land came to be but most follow a similar form. [9]
The creation story- Once the world was completely covered in water. Then came an eagle and a crow. As they were flying they came upon a duck and asked the duck to bring up mud from the water so there can be land again. The duck did as he was asked and this mud became the land of the Yokuts. More specifically the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Coast Mountain Range. [10] To this day the crow and the eagle continue to be symbolic figures in Yokuts religious ceremonies. [10]
Yokuts life was rather peaceful, there were more than 60 tribes with an estimated 400-600 or more people in each tribe at the time of contact with the Spanish in 1770. [11] In Yokuts culture men and women had different responsibilities. [12] Men usually did the hunting, fishing, and building while the women gathered, maintained the home, and cared for the children. [13] Divorce was not difficult to achieve and could be done for a number of reasons including affairs, laziness, and infertility. [12]
Art expression among the Yokuts included music, singing, and painting. [12] Basket making was also a way for the Yokuts to show their artistic skills by weaving designs and images into the baskets. [12] Other forms of expression were done on the bodies of the Yokuts, such as tattoos and piercings. [12]
The Yokuts had two important religious ceremonies they partook in, the annual mourning rite and the first fruit rite. [12] Shamans were important to the Yokuts as they were believed to have supernatural powers, helped conduct ceremonies, and were able to treat the sick. [12] However, shamans were able to use their power for good or evil and depending on how they used their power they could be executed. [12]
The first time the Yokuts encountered Europeans was in 1772, when Spanish troops were in the area searching for soldiers. [10] [12] In the 19th century, missions were introduced by the Spanish and as they expanded they forced the Yokuts to work the land for farming. [10] The harsh working conditions along with disease and abuse led to the death of many Indians. [10] With their work force dwindling the missions moved further inland forcing those they encountered to convert and work. [10]
In 1833, malaria was brought by British fur traders, spreading through the native population through their use of the sweat houses. [10] This decrease in population left the Yokuts weak in numbers when gold was discovered bringing with it more foreigners. [10]
Gold was discovered in California in 19th century. [10] The 1850s were a devastating time for California Indians due to the incursion of European settlers into their homelands, who enslaved or killed the natives in great number. The Gold rush left the Yokuts with no land and a large decrease in their population. [14] In 1853 malaria spread once again among the Yokuts killing more natives, by 1854 what was left of the Yokuts tribe were forced to move to the Fort Tejon Reservation. [10] A few years later the reservation was attacked by white vigilantes who killed most of the inhabitants and by 1859 the reservation was completely abandoned. [10] The Tule reservation was established in 1873 and many Yokuts moved to that reservation. [10] Disease, violence, and relocation severely diminished the Yokuts population so much that today their numbers do not even come close to what they once were. [12]
Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially (See Population of Native California). Alfred L. Kroeber in 1925 [15] put the 1770 population of the Yokuts at 18,000.
Several subsequent investigators suggested that the total should be substantially higher. [16] Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser 1980 [17] suggested that the Yokuts had numbered about 70,000. They had one of the highest regional population densities in pre-contact North America. [2]
The federal government, which had recently acquired California after defeating Mexico in the Mexican War, signed a treaty (one of eighteen such treaties signed state-wide, setting aside seven and a half percent of California's land area) defining a proposed reservation and two hundred head of cattle per year. [18]
The U.S. Senate failed to ratify any of the eighteen treaties in a secret vote cast on July 8, 1852, with every member either abstaining or voting no. The result of the vote was not made public until 1905. The newly organized state government took a different approach. In 1851, California Governor Peter Burnett said that unless the Indians were moved east of the Sierras, "a war of extermination would continue to be waged until the Indian race should become extinct". [19]
Over the course of the next 50 years, settlers and eventually the California State Militia would wage war on the Yokuts and other native tribes in what became known as the Californian Genocide. The Yokuts were reduced by around 93% between 1850 and 1900, with many of the survivors being forced into indentured servitude sanctioned by the California State Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. A few Valley Yokuts remain, the most prominent tribe among them being the Tachi. Kroeber estimated the population of the Yokuts in 1910 as 600.
Today about 2,000 Yokuts are enrolled in the federally recognized tribe. An estimated 600 Yokuts are said to belong to unrecognized tribes. [2]
Yokuts tribes populated the San Joaquin Valley, [2] from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta ("the delta") south to Bakersfield and the adjacent foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, which lies to the east.
In the northern half of the Yokuts region, some tribes inhabited the foothills of the Coast Range to the west. There is evidence of Yokuts inhabiting the Carrizo Plain and creating rock art in the Painted Rock area.
According to San Diego State University, the Yokutsan languages are members of the Penutian language family. [2]
Yokuts used spears, basket traps, and assorted other tools to hunt a variety of local animals, such as game birds, waterfowl, rabbits, turtles, various fish, mussels, and wasp grubs. Big game was hunted less frequently, but included deer, elk, and antelope. Their staple food was derived from acorn mash, though they also gathered tule roots and iris bulbs to make flour. Other foraged food includes manzanita berries, pine nuts, and seeds. They used a form of horticulture to cultivate tobacco. Salt came from salt grass. [20]
The contemporary Wukchumni and Choinumni communities do not yet have federal recognition. [23]
As of the 2010 census there are a total of 6,273 people who identify as Yokuts. [12] Many of them live on reservations that have casinos, these casinos have been essential to providing the Yokuts with jobs, money, and healthcare. [12]
The Yokuts tribe of California are known to have engaged in trading with other California tribes of Native Americans in the United States including coastal peoples like, for example, the Chumash tribe of the Central California coast, and they are known to have traded plant and animal products.
Other items part of Yokuts trade included salts, soap stones, and obsidian. [13] They used marine shells as a form of money showing they had a functional monetary system in place. [13]
On April 5, 2015, it was reported that members of the Chukchansi tribe near Yosemite have been disenrolling other members from the tribe for decades, so that the tribe's casino profits go to fewer people. In the autumn of 2014, several disenrolled Chukchansi tribe members (who were no longer receiving a share of casino profits) arrived at the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino armed with guns, and violence ensued. As a result, a federal judge ordered that the casino be shut down. [24] The casino reopened on December 31, 2015, and a formal Grand Reopening Ceremony took place on January 15, 2016.
Every tribe has a Head Chief, Winatun, and a Village Chief. [25]
Tulare Lake or Tache Lake is a freshwater lake in the southern San Joaquin Valley, California, United States. Historically, Tulare Lake was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River, and the second-largest freshwater lake entirely in the United States based upon surface area. For thousands of years, from the Paleolithic onward, Tulare Lake was a uniquely rich area, which supported perhaps the largest population of Native Americans north of Mexico.
Achomawi are the northerly nine bands of the Pit River tribe of Palaihnihan Native Americans who live in what is now northeastern California in the United States. These 5 autonomous bands of the Pit River Indians historically spoke slightly different dialects of one common language, and the other two bands spoke dialects of a related language, called Atsugewi. The name "Achomawi" means river people and properly applies to the band which historically inhabited the Fall River Valley and the Pit River from the south end of Big Valley Mountains, westerly to Pit River Falls. The nine bands of Achumawi lived on both sides of the Pit River from its origin at Goose Lake to Montgomery Creek, and the two bands of Atsugewi lived south of the Pit River on creeks tributary to it in the Hat Creek valley and Dixie Valley.
Yokuts, formerly known as Mariposa, is an endangered language spoken in the interior of Northern and Central California in and around the San Joaquin Valley by the Yokuts people. The speakers of Yokuts were severely affected by disease, missionaries, and the Gold Rush. While descendants of Yokuts speakers currently number in the thousands, all constituent dialects except for Valley Yokuts are now extinct.
The Mono are a Native American people who traditionally live in the central Sierra Nevada, the Eastern Sierra, the Mono Basin, and adjacent areas of the Great Basin. They are often grouped under the historical label "Paiute" together with the Northern Paiute and Southern Paiute – but these three groups, although related within the Numic group of Uto-Aztecan languages, do not form a single, unique, unified group of Great Basin tribes.
Valley Yokuts is a dialect cluster of the Yokutsan language family of California.
The Kitanemuk are an indigenous people of California. They traditionally lived in the Tehachapi Mountains and the Antelope Valley area of the western Mojave Desert of southern California, United States. Today some Kitanemuk people are enrolled in the federally recognized Tejon Indian Tribe of California.
The Tübatulabal are an indigenous people of Kern River Valley in the Sierra Nevada range of California. They may have been the first people to make this area their permanent home. Today many of them are enrolled in the Tule River Indian Tribe. They are descendants of the people of the Uto-Aztecan language group, separating from Shoshone people about 3000 years ago.
The Kaweah River is a river draining the southern Sierra Nevada in Tulare County, California in the United States. Fed primarily by high elevation snowmelt along the Great Western Divide, the Kaweah begins as four forks in Sequoia National Park, where the watershed is noted for its alpine scenery and its dense concentrations of giant sequoias, the largest trees on Earth. It then flows in a southwest direction to Lake Kaweah – the only major reservoir on the river – and into the San Joaquin Valley, where it diverges into multiple channels across an alluvial plain around Visalia. With its Middle Fork headwaters starting at almost 13,000 feet (4,000 m) above sea level, the river has a vertical drop of nearly two and a half miles (4.0 km) on its short run to the San Joaquin Valley, making it one of the steepest river drainages in the United States. Although the main stem of the Kaweah is only 33.6 miles (54.1 km) long, its total length including headwaters and lower branches is nearly 100 miles (160 km).
The Plains and Sierra Miwok were once the largest group of California Indian Miwok people, indigenous to California. Their homeland included regions of the Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin Valley, and the Sierra Nevada.
Yokuts traditional narratives include myths, legends, tales, and oral histories preserved by the Yokuts people of the San Joaquin Valley and southern Sierra Nevada foothills of central California.
Fine Gold Creek, in Fine Gold Gulch, is a creek in a gulch in Madera County, California that is a river tributary of the San Joaquin River. It is approximately 18 miles (29 km) from its mouth on the San Joaquin through where it has two forks to its headwaters.
The Tule River Indian Tribe of the Tule River Reservation is a federally recognized tribe of Native Americans. The Tule River Reservation is located in Tulare County, California. The reservation was made up of Yokuts, about 200 Yowlumne, Wukchumnis, and Western Mono and Tübatulabal. Tribal enrollment today is approximately 1,857 with 1,033 living on the Reservation.
Visalia, California, commonly known in the 1850s as Four Creeks, is the oldest continuously inhabited inland European settlement between Stockton and Los Angeles. The city played an important role in the American colonization of the San Joaquin Valley as the county seat of Old Tulare County, an expansive region comprising most if not all of modern-day Fresno, Kings, and Kern counties.
Chukchansi (Chuk'chansi) is a dialect of Foothill and Valley Yokuts spoken in and around the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians, in the San Joaquin Valley of California, by the Chukchansi band of Yokuts. As of 2011, there were eight native speakers.
The Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians of California is a federally recognized tribe of indigenous people of California. They are Chukchansi or Foothills Yokuts. Picayune Rancheria is the tribe's ranchería, located in Madera County in central California.
Tachi is an endangered dialect of Southern Valley Yokuts historically spoken north of Tulare Lake in the Central Valley of California. A. L. Kroeber estimated that Tachi was, at one point, one of the most widely spoken Yokutsan dialects.
The Tule River War of 1856 was a conflict where American settlers, and later, California State Militia, and a detachment of the U. S. Army from Fort Miller, fought a six-week war against the Yokuts in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
Yawdanchi was a dialect of Tule-Kaweah Yokuts that was historically spoken by the Yawdanchi Yokuts people living along the Tule River in the Tulare Lake Basin of California. The Yawdanchi dialect is closely related to the †Wiikchamni dialect.