Yana people#Yahi

The Yana-speaking people comprise four groups: the North Yana, the Central Yana, the Southern Yana, and the Yahi, two of which - the Central and Southern - have living descendants. The noun stem Ya- means "person"; the noun suffix is -na in the northern Yana dialects and -hi [xi] in the southern dialects.

{{further|Population of Native California}}

Anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber put the 1770 population of the Yana at 1,500,Kroeber, p.883 and Sherburne F. Cook estimated their numbers at 1,900 and 1,850.Cook, 1976a:177, 1976b:16 Other estimates of the total Yana population before the Gold Rush exceed 3,000. They lived on wild game, salmon, fruit, acorns and roots.Pritzker, Barry M. (2000). [https://books.google.com/books?id=ZxWJVc4ST0AC&pg=PA156 A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples], p. 156. Oxford University Press.

Their territory was approximately 2,400 square miles, or more than 6,000 km², and contained mountain streams, gorges, boulder-strewn hills, and lush meadows. Each group had relatively distinct boundaries, dialects and customs.[http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/5views/5views1h39.htm "Ishi's Hiding Place", Butte County] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060716172531/http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/5views/5views1h39.htm |date=July 16, 2006 }}, A History of American Indians in California: HISTORIC SITES, National Park Service, 2004, accessed November 5, 2010

The Yahi were the southernmost portion of the Yana.{{cite web |title=We Are California: The Yana/Yahi People |url=http://www.weareca.org/index.php/en/era/precontact/yana_yahi.html |website=California Humanities |access-date=November 16, 2014}} They were hunter-gatherers who lived in small egalitarian bands without centralized political authority, were reclusive and fiercely defended their territory of mountain canyons. The Yahi initially{{when|date=November 2024}} numbered around 400.{{citation |last=Diamond |first=Jared |author-link=Jared Diamond |title=Guns, Germs, and Steel |publisher=W. W. Norton & Company |location=New York |year=1997 |page=374 |isbn=0-393-31755-2}}

The Yahi were the first Yana group to suffer from the Californian Gold Rush, as their lands were the closest to the gold fields. They suffered great population losses from the loss of their traditional food supplies and fought with the settlers over territory. They lacked firearms, and armed white settlers committed genocide against them in multiple raids. These raids took place as part of the California Genocide, during which the U.S. Army and vigilante militias carried out killings as well as the relocation of thousands of indigenous peoples in California.Robert K. Hitchcock, and Charles Flowerday. “Ishi and the California Indian Genocide as Developmental Mass Violence.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, no. 42, Department of Sociology, Humboldt State University, 2020, pp. 69–85. The massacre reduced the Yahi, who were already suffering from starvation, to a population of less than 100.{{when|date=November 2024}}

On August 6, 1865, seventeen settlers raided a Yahi village at dawn. In 1866, more Yahis were massacred when they were caught by surprise in a ravine. Circa 1867, 33 Yahis were killed after being tracked to a cave north of Mill Creek. Circa 1871, four cowboys trapped and killed about 30 Yahis in Kingsley cave.

{{main|Ishi}}

File:Ishi 1914.jpg

The last known survivor of the Yahi was named Ishi by American anthropologists. Ishi had spent most of his life hiding with his tribe members in the Sierra wilderness, emerging at the age of about 49, after the deaths of his mother and remaining relatives. He was the only Yahi known to Americans. Ishi emerged from the mountains near Oroville, California, on August 29, 1911, having lived his entire life outside of the settler-colonial culture.{{cite book|title=Ishi in Three Centuries|page=377|isbn=0-8032-2757-4 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=YFghGGXLJ7IC&pg=PA377 |last1=Kroeber |first1=Karl |last2=Kroeber |first2=Clifton B. |date=January 2003 |publisher=U of Nebraska Press }}

Ishi would teach Saxton T. Pope archery as referenced in Pope's book on archery by the last Yana Indian.{{Cite book |last=Pope |first=Saxton T. (Saxton Temple) |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8084 |title=Hunting with the Bow & Arrow |date=2005-05-01 |language=English}} He died in 1916.

• Yana language
• Yana traditional narratives
• Indigenous peoples of California

{{reflist}}

• Cook, Sherburne F. 1976a. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization. University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Cook, Sherburne F. 1976b. The Population of the California Indians, 1769–1970. University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Heizer, Robert F., and Theodora Kroeber (editors). 1979. Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History. University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Johnson, Jerald Jay. 1978. "Yana" in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 8 (California), pp. 361–369. Robert F. Heizer, ed. (William C. Sturtevant, general ed.) Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. {{ISBN|0-16-004578-9}}/{{ISBN|0160045754}}.
• Kroeber, A. L. 1925. [https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002494436 Handbook of the Indians of California]. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78. Washington, D.C.
• Kroeber, Theodora. 1961. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Sapir, Edward (1910). [https://archive.org/details/yanatexts00sapirich "Yana Texts"], University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 1, no. 9. Berkeley: University Press.

• [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104531/ Ishi: The Last Yahi (1992), documentary], IMDB
• [http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moajrnl;cc=moajrnl;rgn=full%20text;idno=ahj1472.1-12.005;didno=ahj1472.1-12.005;view=image;seq=0408;node=ahj1472.1-12.005%3A4], Overland Monthly Journal, 1875, online at University of Michigan
• [http://www.californiaprehistory.com/tribmap.html Map: "Native Tribes, Groups, Language Families, and Dialects of California region in 1770"], California Prehistory

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{{Populations of Native California Groups}}

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Category:Indigenous peoples of California

Category:History of the Sierra Nevada (United States)

Category:Extinct Native American tribes

Category:Extinct Native American peoples