The Yuki (also known as Yukiah) are an Indigenous people of California who were traditionally divided into three groups: Ukomno'om ("Valley People", or Yuki proper),
Yuki tribes are thought to have settled as far south as Hood Mountain in present-day Sonoma County.
History
Archaeologists, including
Alfred Kroeber, have speculated that the Yuki have been resident in California for many thousands of years and once occupying a greater area than their historic homeland in Mendocino County. The Yuki language is an isolate, unrelated to other Native American languages, although distant relationships to other languages have been proposed by
Joseph Greenberg and others. Scholars have also said that Yuki physical appearance is different than most other Native American peoples. They are described as short in stature and long-headed (
Dolichocephalic), unusual in American Indians, but perhaps similar to the extinct
Guaycura people and Pericú of Baja California, also believed by archaeologists to be ancient residents of the Americas.
In 1856, the US government established the Indian reservation of Nome Cult Farm (later to become Round Valley Indian Reservation) at Round Valley.
Language
The
Yuki language has been extinct since its last speaker, Arthur Anderson, died in 1983.
It is distantly related to the
Wappo language,
[ "Yuki." Ethnologue. Retrieved 23 October 2012.] the two languages making up the entirety of the Yukian language family. The Yuki people had a quaternary (4-based)
counting system, based on counting the spaces between the fingers, rather than the fingers themselves.
[Harrison, p.173]
Population
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.
[Kroeber, p.883] Sherburne F. Cook initially raised this total slightly to 3,500.
[Cook, 1976 p.172] Subsequently, he proposed a higher estimate of 9,730 Yuki.
[Cook, 1956 pp. 106, 108]
According to the research of Benjamin Madley, "the Yuki suffered a cataclysmic population decline under United States rule. Between 1854 and 1864, settlement policies, murders, abductions, massacres, rape-induced venereal diseases, and willful neglect at Round Valley Reservation reduced them from perhaps 20,000 to several hundred."
In his work, Madley argues that Yuki history constitutes a clear-cut example of
genocide. He cites the fact that there is no evidence of any epidemic that would have caused such drastic population decline among the Yuki between 1854 and 1864, other than venereal diseases originating from European settlers.
His research thus challenges the idea that the indirect effects of European colonization were the leading cause of population decline and mass death for Native Americans.
E.N. Anderson a professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Riverside writes that the extermination of the Yuki, a helpless colonized people, was a genocidal massacre.
Intermarriage among neighboring tribes after their forced relocation to the Round Valley Reservation resulted in large numbers of Native Americans with mixed ancestry.
In the 2010 census, 569 people claimed Yuki ancestry. 255 of them were full-blooded.
Ethnobotany
Yuki people use the large roots of
Carex plants to make baskets.
[Curtin, L. S. M., 1957, Some Plants Used by the Yuki Indians ... II. Food Plants, The Masterkey 31:85-94, page 93]
See also
-
Yuki traditional narratives
Sources
-
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
