Yuki people

Yuki people

Yuki men at the Nome Cult Farm, ca. 1858
Total population
85
Regions with significant populations
United States (California)
Languages
English, formerly Yuki language
Related ethnic groups
Wappo people

The Yuki are an indigenous people of California, whose traditional territory is around Round Valley, Mendocino County. Today they are enrolled members of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of the Round Valley Reservation.

Yuki tribes are thought to have settled as far south as Hood Mountain in present-day Sonoma County.

Name

The Yuki call themselves the autonym Ukomno'm, meaning "Valley People." European Americans learned and adopted the name "Yuki" from the their neighbors, the Nomlaki, who called them "enemy" in the Wintu language. "Yuki" is an exonym, a name by another group. European Americans learned of the Yuki from the Nomlaki, traditional enemies of the Yuki, around 1850.

History

As European-American settlers began to flock to Northern California in the early 1850s, they drove the Yuki from their lands. The Indians suffered deaths in raids by the local ranchers and the authorities, and captives were taken into slavery.

In 1856, the US government established the Indian reservation of Nome Cult Farm (later to become Round Valley Indian Reservation) at Round Valley. It forced thousands of Yuki and other local tribes on to these lands, often without sufficient support for the transition. These events and tensions led to the Mendocino War (1859), where US forces killed hundreds of Yuki and took others by force to Nome Cult Farm.^{[citation needed]}

Language

Distribution of Yuki-Wappo languages

The Yuki language is no longer spoken. It is related to the Wappo language, and both are Penutian languages. The Yuki people had a quaternary (4-based) counting system, based on counting the spaces between the fingers, rather than the fingers themselves.

Population

Further information: Population of Native California

Scholarly estimates have varied substantially for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California, as historians and anthropologists have tried to evaluate early documentation. Alfred L. Kroeber estimated the 1770 population of the Yuki proper, Huchnom, and Coast Yuki as 2,000, 500, and 500, respectively, or 3,000 in all. Sherburne F. Cook initially raised this total slightly to 3,500. Subsequently, he proposed a higher estimate of 9,730 Yuki.

Of the approximately 85 Yuki people today, 50 of them live on the Round Valley Reservation.

See also

• Yuki traditional narratives

References

• Cook, Sherburne F. 1956. "The Aboriginal Population of the North Coast of California", Anthropological Records, 16:81-130. University of California, Berkeley.
• Cook, Sherburne F. 1976. The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization. University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Harrison, K. David 2007. When Languages Die. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Kroeber, A. L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78. Washington, D.C.

External links

• Four Directions Institute
• Round Valley history
• "Central California culture", Four Directions Institute