The Yuki (also known as Yukiah) are an

indigenous people of California The indigenous peoples of California (known as Native Californians) are the indigenous inhabitants who have lived or currently live in the geographic area within the current boundaries of California before and after the arrival of Europeans. ...

, whose traditional territory is around Round Valley,

Mendocino County Mendocino County (; ''Mendocino'', Spanish for "of Mendoza) is a county located on the North Coast of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 91,601. The county seat is Ukiah. Mendocino County consists whol ...

. Today they are enrolled members of the

Round Valley Indian Tribes of the Round Valley Reservation The Round Valley Indian Reservation is a federally recognized Indian reservation lying primarily in northern Mendocino County, California, United States. A small part of it extends northward into southern Trinity County. The total land area, incl ...

. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Yuki called themselves "Ukomno'om," meaning "valley people." The

exonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...

"Yuki" may derive from the

Wintu The Wintu (also Northern Wintun) are Native Americans who live in what is now Northern California. They are part of a loose association of peoples known collectively as the Wintun (or Wintuan). Others are the Nomlaki and the Patwin. The Wintu ...

word meaning "foreigner" or "enemy." Yuki tribes are thought to have settled as far south as

Hood Mountain Mount Hood, also known as Hood Mountain is a mountain near the southeastern edge of Santa Rosa, California at the northeast of the Sonoma Valley and attains a height of . The original name was Mount Wilikos, an Indian name meaning "willows." ...

in present-day

Sonoma County Sonoma County () is a county (United States), county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States Census, its population was 488,863. Its county seat and largest city is Santa Rosa, California, Santa Rosa. It is to the n ...

History

In 1856, the US government established the

Indian reservation An Indian reservation is an area of land held and governed by a federally recognized Native American tribal nation whose government is accountable to the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs and not to the state government in which it ...

of Nome Cult Farm (later to become

Round Valley Indian Reservation Round or rounds may refer to: Mathematics and science * The contour of a closed curve or surface with no sharp corners, such as an ellipse, circle, rounded rectangle, cant, or sphere * Rounding, the shortening of a number to reduce the numbe ...

) at Round Valley.

Language

The

Yuki language Yuki, also known as Ukomno'm, is an extinct language of California, formerly spoken by the Yuki people. The Yuki are the original inhabitants of the Eel River area and the Round Valley Reservation of northern California. Yuki ceased to be used ...

is not spoken as much but they are still teaching them in certain schools. It is distantly related to the

Wappo language Wappo is an extinct language that was spoken by the Wappo tribe, Native Americans who lived in what is now known as the Alexander Valley north of San Francisco. The last fluent speaker, Laura Fish Somersal, died in 1990. The loss of this language i ...

, forming the Yukian family with it. The Yuki people had a quaternary (4-based)

counting system In linguistics, a numeral (or number word) in the broadest sense is a word or phrase that describes a numerical quantity. Some theories of grammar use the word "numeral" to refer to cardinal numbers that act as a determiner that specify the quant ...

, based on counting the spaces between the fingers, rather than the fingers themselves.

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 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 ...

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 Sherburne Friend Cook (1896-1974) was an American physiologist, who served as professor and chairman of the department of physiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was notable as a pioneer in population studies of the native peopl ...

initially raised this total slightly to 3,500. Subsequently, he proposed a higher estimate of 9,730 Yuki. Benjamin Madley wrote that "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 Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word (, "race, people") with the Latin ...

. He cites the fact that other than venereal diseases introduced by Europeans, stating that there is no evidence of any epidemic that would have caused such drastic population decline among the Yuki between 1854 and 1864. 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. Intermarriage among neighboring tribes after their forced relocation to the Round Valley Reservation resulted in large numbers of Native Americans with mixed ancestry. Many of these people are descendants of many local tribes and have come to be called Round Valley Indian Tribes. In the 2010 census, 569 people claimed Yuki ancestry. Two hundred fifty-five of them were full-blooded.

Ethnobotany

They use the large roots of

Carex ''Carex'' is a vast genus of more than 2,000 species of grass-like plants in the family Cyperaceae, commonly known as sedges (or seg, in older books). Other members of the family Cyperaceae are also called sedges, however those of genus ''Carex'' ...

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

References

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

*
Round Valley history
*, Four Directions Institute {{authority control Native American tribes in California Native American tribes in Mendocino County, California