Northern Paiute people

The Northern Paiute, who call themselves Numu or Numa, are a Numic-speaking people of the western Great Basin. Their homelands take in western Nevada, eastern California and south-eastern Oregon, a region of desert valleys, salt flats and scattered lakes. Today they belong to a string of federally recognised tribes, colonies and reservations across all three states, often shared with Shoshone neighbours.

Humans have lived in this part of the West for more than 11,000 years. In the period before outside contact, Northern Paiute life was built around a seasonal round. Each band held its own territory, usually centred on a lake or wetland where fish and waterfowl could be taken, and people moved through the year to follow ripening plants and migrating animals. Neighbouring bands joined forces for communal drives that netted rabbits and pronghorn, and families seem to have shifted easily from one band to another.

Bands were commonly known by a signature food. The people of Pyramid Lake were the Kuyui Dükadü, "cui-ui eaters", after the lake's sucker fish; those of the Carson Sink were the "tule eaters", and a group at Mono Lake were the "brine fly eaters". In autumn, families climbed into the mountains to harvest pinyon nuts, a vital winter store, and women collected roots and the seeds of wild grasses.

Relations with the Western Shoshone were generally peaceful, and the line between the two peoples is not sharp. Ties with the culturally very different Washoe were less friendly, and oral traditions on both sides recall long hostility with the Klamath and the Achomawi. Northern Paiute belief centres on puha, a life-giving power that moves through the elements, plants and animals; healers known as puhagim drew on it at sacred places across the Basin. Origin stories, told in winter as chanted song-poems, feature Coyote, "the one who fixed things", and the quarrelling children from whom neighbouring peoples descend.

Sustained contact with Euro-Americans began in the early 1840s, though first meetings may date to the 1820s. The Northern Paiute had taken up horses but were otherwise little changed by outside influence. As settlers competed for scarce water, grass and game, disputes escalated into the Pyramid Lake War of 1860, the Owens Valley conflict of 1861–1864, the Snake War of 1864–1868 and the Bannock War of 1878. Introduced diseases such as smallpox killed far more Paiute than the fighting. Sarah Winnemucca's 1883 book Life Among the Piutes gave a first-hand account of these years, and she became a well-known advocate for her people.

The United States first tried to gather the Northern Paiute on the Malheur Reservation in eastern Oregon, but it lay far from most bands' homelands and many refused to go or soon left. As grazing and farming degraded their lands, families found work on ranches and in towns, forming small "Indian colonies" near cities and farm districts, often together with Shoshone and, around Reno, Washoe people. The government later set up larger reservations at Pyramid Lake and Duck Valley. From the early 20th century it also granted land to the colonies, and several of them won recognition as tribes under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.

Present-day communities include the Pyramid Lake and Walker River reservations, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribes, the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Lovelock, Yerington and Reno-Sparks colonies, and the Fort Bidwell and Bridgeport communities in California. The Northern Paiute language had around 500 fluent speakers in 1994. Since 2005 it has been taught in schools on the Warm Springs Reservation, and in 2013 Washoe County became the first Nevada school district to offer it as a high-school subject.

Our maps for 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Northern Paiute territory across the western Great Basin. On the 1650 map it borders the Shoshone, the Nez Perce, the Modoc and the Miwok, with the Southern Paiute to the south-east and the Yokuts close by to the south-west.