Yuki people


The Yuki are an indigenous people of California, whose traditional territory is around Round Valley, Mendocino County. Today they are enrolled members of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of the Round Valley Reservation.
Yuki tribes are thought to have settled as far south as Hood Mountain in present-day Sonoma County.

History

In 1856, the US government established the Indian reservation of Nome Cult Farm at Round Valley.

Language

The Yuki language is no longer spoken. It is distantly related to the Wappo language, forming the Yukian family with it. The Yuki people had a quaternary counting system, 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 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 initially raised this total slightly to 3,500. Subsequently, he proposed a higher estimate of 9,730 Yuki.
In the 2010 census, 569 people claimed Yuki ancestry. 255 of them were full-blooded.