The Yuki are a Native American people from the zone of Round Valley, in what today is part of the territory of Mendocino County, Northern California. Yuki tribes are thought to have settled as far south as Hood Mountain in present-day Sonoma County. In their own language, the Yuki call themselves the autonym Ukomno'm (Valley People).
European Americans learned and adopted the name Yuki from the their neighbors and competitors, the Nomlaki, who called them "enemy" in Wintu language. Yuki was thus an exonym, a name by another group. European Americans learned of the Yuki from the Nomlaki circa 1850.
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Unlike most Californian peoples, the Yuki were aggressive and attacked other nearby native peoples on several occasions. As European-American settlers began to flock to Northern California in the early 1850s, they drove the Yuki from their lands. The Indians suffered deaths in raids by the local ranchers and the authorities, and captives were taken into slavery.
In 1856, the US government established the Indian reservation of Nome Cult Farm (later to become Round Valley Indian Reservation) at Round Valley. It forced thousands of Yuki and other local tribes on to these lands, often without sufficient support for the transition. These events and tensions led to the Mendocino War (1859), where US forces killed hundreds of Yuki and took others by force to Nome Cult Farm.
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.[1] Sherburne F. Cook initially raised this total slightly to 3,500.[2] Subsequently, he proposed a higher estimate of 9,730 Yuki.[3]
Reportedly, only 100 Yuki remain today. The Yuki language is spoken by no more than a dozen individuals.
The Yuki people had a quaternary (4-based) counting system, based on counting the spaces between the fingers, rather than the fingers themselves.[4]