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 enroll ...

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

Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and 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 populous urban ...

. 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 List of the most populous counties in the United States, most populous county in the United States and in the U.S. state of California, ...

and southern Ventura County, 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 C ...

, and the Sierra Pelona Mountains. 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 historicall ...

peoples. Their tribal government is based in San Fernando, California, 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. The Tataviam are a not federally recognized, 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, and have been distinguished from the

and the Fernandeño.

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 ''Yucca ...

'' 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. Th ...

, 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 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: 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." 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 di ...

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 W ...

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 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 (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