The Tataviam (

Kitanemuk 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 ...

: ''people on the south slope'') are a Native American group in

Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and Cultural area, cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the second most po ...

. The ancestral land of the Tataviam people includes northwest present-day

Los Angeles County Los Angeles County, officially the County of Los Angeles, and sometimes abbreviated as L.A. County, is the most populous county in the United States and in the U.S. state of California, with 9,861,224 residents estimated as of 2022. It is the ...

and southern

Ventura County Ventura County () is a county in the southern part of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 843,843. The largest city is Oxnard, and the county seat is the city of Ventura. Ventura County comprises the Oxnar ...

, primarily in the upper basin of the Santa Clara River, the

Santa Susana Mountains The Santa Susana Mountains are a transverse range of mountains in Southern California, north of the city of Los Angeles, in the United States. The range runs east-west, separating the San Fernando and Simi valleys on its south from the Santa Cla ...

, and the

Sierra Pelona Mountains The Sierra Pelona, also known as the Sierra Pelona Ridge or the Sierra Pelona Mountains, is a mountain ridge in the Transverse Ranges in Southern California. Located in northwest Los Angeles County, the ridge is bordered on the north by the San An ...

. They are distinct from the

and the

Gabrielino-Tongva The Tongva ( ) are an Indigenous people of California from the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands, an area covering approximately . Some descendants of the people prefer Kizh as an endonym that, they argue, is more historically ...

peoples. Their tribal government is based in

San Fernando, California San Fernando (Spanish language, Spanish for "Ferdinand III of Castile, St. Ferdinand") is a General-law municipality, general-law city in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles County, California, in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. It ...

, and includes the Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, the Tribal Senate, and the Council of Elders. The current Tribal President of the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians is Rudy Ortega Jr., who is a descendant of the village of

Tochonanga Tochonanga was a Tataviam village now located at the area of what is now Newhall, Santa Clarita, California, along the Santa Clara River. People baptized from the village were largely moved to Mission San Fernando Rey de España and referred to ...

. The Tataviam are a not

federally recognized This is a list of federally recognized tribes in the contiguous United States of America. There are also federally recognized Alaska Native tribes. , 574 Indian tribes were legally recognized by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) of the United ...

, which has prevented the tribe from being seen as sovereign and erased the identity of tribal members. The tribe has established an ''Acknowledge Rent'' campaign to acknowledge "the financial hardships placed on non-federally recognized tribes."

History

Ancestral land

The

Santa Clarita Valley The Santa Clarita Valley (SCV) is part of the upper watershed of the Santa Clara River in Southern California. The valley was part of the Rancho San Francisco Mexican land grant. Located in Los Angeles County, its main population center is th ...

is believed to be the center of Tataviam territory, north of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1776, they were noted as a distinct linguistic and cultural group, by Padre

Francisco Garcés Francisco Hermenegildo Tomás Garcés (April 12, 1738 – July 18, 1781) was a Spanish Franciscan friar who served as a missionary and explorer in the colonial Viceroyalty of New Spain. He explored much of the southwestern region of North Amer ...

, and have been distinguished from the

and the

Fernandeño The Tongva language (also known as Gabrielino or Gabrieleño) is an extinct Uto-Aztecan language formerly spoken by the Tongva, a Native American people who live in and around Los Angeles, California. It has not been a language of everyday conve ...

Lifestyle

The Tataviam people had summer and winter settlements. They harvested''

Yucca whipplei ''Hesperoyucca whipplei'' ( syn. ''Yucca whipplei''), the chaparral yucca, our Lord's candle, Spanish bayonet, Quixote yucca or foothill yucca, is a species of flowering plant closely related to, and formerly usually included in, the genus ''Yucc ...

'' and ''wa'at'' or juniper berries."Antelope Valley Indian Peoples: Tataviam."
''Antelope Valley Indian Museum. Retrieved 18 Aug 2015.

Traditional language

Colonial scholars found themselves confused in their attempts to discern the language spoken by the Tataviam. Eventually it became clear that errors had been made in compiling their word lists: the vocabularies recorded by colonial scholar C. Hart Merriam were not in fact Tatavian, but rather were from a Chumash dialect, while the vocabularies recorded by Alfred Kroeber and John P. Harrington were of the

Uto-Aztecan language Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or (rarely in English) Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The na ...

, meaning it is probably more likely that their recordings are the language spoken by the Tataviam people before they experienced genocide and language loss. Further research has shown that the

belonged to the

Takic The Takic languages are a putative group of Uto-Aztecan languages historically spoken by a number of Indigenous peoples of California, Indigenous peoples of Southern California. Takic is grouped with the Tübatulabal language, Tubatulabal, Hopi la ...

branch of that language family, specifically the Serran branch along with Kitanemuk and Serrano. The last known Tataviam speaker died before 1916.

Neighboring tribes

According to settler accounts, the Tataviam were called the Alliklik by their neighbors, the

Chumash Chumash may refer to: *Chumash (Judaism), a Hebrew word for the Pentateuch, used in Judaism *Chumash people, a Native American people of southern California *Chumashan languages, indigenous languages of California See also * Chumash traditional ...

(

: meaning ''grunter'' or ''stammerer''), probably because of the way their language sounds to Chumash ears.

Spanish colonization

The Spanish first encountered the Tataviam during their 1769-1770 expeditions. According to Chester King and Thomas C. Blackburn (1978:536), "By 1810, virtually all the Tataviam had been baptized at

Mission San Fernando Rey de España Mission San Fernando Rey de España is a Spanish mission in the Mission Hills community of Los Angeles, California. The mission was founded on 8 September 1797 at the site of Achooykomenga, and was the seventeenth of the twenty-one Spanish mis ...

." Like many other indigenous groups, they suffered high rates of fatalities from

infectious diseases An infection is the invasion of tissues by pathogens, their multiplication, and the reaction of host tissues to the infectious agent and the toxins they produce. An infectious disease, also known as a transmissible disease or communicable dise ...

brought by the Spanish.

Tataviam land ceded to the United States

Following the

Mexican Cession The Mexican Cession ( es, Cesión mexicana) is the region in the modern-day southwestern United States that Mexico originally controlled, then ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 after the Mexican–American War ...

1848, the ancestral land of the Tataviam people changed from Mexican rule to being part of the United States. The United States Indian Affairs decided to group the Tataviam with other Indian Villages in the same region, which is now Fort Tejon Indian Reservation.

The California Genocide

During the

California Genocide The California genocide was the killing of thousands of indigenous peoples of California by United States government agents and private citizens in the 19th century. It began following the American Conquest of California from Mexico, and the ...

from 1846 to 1873, California’s Native American population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Many contemporary Tataviam people trace their lineage back to the original Tataviam people through genealogical records,Johnson, John R., and David D. Earle. 1990. "Tataviam Geography and Ethnohistory"
''Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology'' 12:191-214, accessed 11 October 2011 demonstrating the resilience of the Tataviam people in the face of genocide.

Alfred L. Kroeber Alfred Louis Kroeber (June 11, 1876 – October 5, 1960) was an American cultural anthropologist. He received his PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1901, the first doctorate in anthropology awarded by Columbia. He was also the first ...

(1925:883) estimated the combined population of the Serrano, Kitanemuk, and Tataviam to be 3,500 people in 1770. By 1910, their population was recorded at 150.

Notes

External links

Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians
(official)
"Tataviam"
Antelope Valley Indian Museum, California Parks

''Old Town Newhall Gazette'', January–February 1996 {{authority control Native American tribes in California California Mission Indians History of Los Angeles County, California History of Ventura County, California Santa Susana Mountains Unrecognized tribes in the United States