Yokuts

California's Central Valley is the home of the Yokuts, whose lands stretch from the Sacramento–San Joaquin delta south to the Bakersfield area and up into the Sierra Nevada foothills. Before contact they formed up to 60 separate tribes speaking related Yokuts languages, and they are usually grouped as Northern Valley, Southern Valley and Foothill Yokuts. At the 2010 census 6,273 people identified as Yokuts.

Yokuts, a word meaning "people", is both singular and plural; older sources sometimes called them Mariposans. Some Yokuts reject the collective name as an outsiders' term and prefer their own tribal names, such as Chukchansi, Tachi or Wukchumni. Tulare Lake, once a vast shallow lake on the valley floor, was a major centre of population, and Yokuts rock art has been found as far west as the Carrizo Plain. Their languages are usually placed in the proposed Penutian grouping, and a narrower Yok-Utian family has also been suggested.

The Yokuts lived at some of the highest population densities in pre-contact North America. Kroeber in 1925 estimated about 18,000 people around 1770, while Heizer and Elsasser in 1980 suggested a figure closer to 70,000. Acorn mash was the staple food, supplemented by flour from tule roots and iris bulbs, waterfowl, fish, mussels, turtles and rabbits; deer, elk and pronghorn were hunted less often, and wasp grubs were a seasonal treat. Tobacco was the only crop gardened. Yokuts traded salt, steatite and obsidian with coastal peoples such as the Chumash, using marine shells as money.

Each tribe had a head chief and village chiefs. Shamans led ceremonies and healed the sick, but were feared as well, since their power could be turned to harm. The annual mourning rite and the first-fruits rite were key religious events. In one creation story, an eagle and a crow persuade a duck to bring up mud from a flooded world, forming the mountains of the Yokuts' land. Basketry, music, painting and tattooing were important forms of art.

Spanish soldiers first reached Yokuts country in 1772, and as the missions pushed inland in the 19th century they forced many Yokuts into farm labour. Malaria, brought by fur traders in 1833, killed large numbers and spread again in 1853. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of settlers. In 1851 Governor Peter Burnett declared that a "war of extermination" would go on unless Native people were moved east of the Sierra, and in 1852 the US Senate, voting in secret, refused to ratify the 18 treaties that would have set aside reservations for California tribes. In what scholars call the California genocide, the Yokuts population fell by around 93 per cent between 1850 and 1900, and survivors were often forced into indentured servitude under state law. Settlers drove the last independent communities from Tulare Lake in the 1870s.

Survivors were moved to the Fort Tejon Reservation in 1854, which was abandoned in 1864; the Tule River Reservation followed in 1873. Today about 2,000 Yokuts belong to federally recognised tribes, including the Picayune Rancheria of Chukchansi Indians, the Santa Rosa Rancheria of the Tachi Yokut and the Tule River Indian Tribe, while others belong to unrecognised communities such as the Wukchumni and Choinumni. Gaming revenue funds jobs and health care. Only Valley Yokuts survives as a spoken language, and in 2012 Fresno State University received a $1 million grant to produce a Chukchansi dictionary and teaching materials.

Our maps for 1492, 1530, 1600, 1650, 1700 and 1715 draw an approximate Yokuts territory in the San Joaquin Valley. On the 1650 map it borders the Miwok, Kawaiisu and Serrano, with the Northern Paiute across the Sierra to the east and the Pomo further north-west.