The Yokuts, also called Mariposan, a name derived from present-day Mariposa County, are native to central California.

Yokuts means “person” or “people.” Members of the Penutian language family. They occupied a strip about 250 miles long on the floor of the San Joaquin Valley, from the mouth of the San Joaquin River to the foot of the Tehachapi Mountains and the adjacent lower slopes or foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, up to an altitude of a few thousand feet, from the Fresno River South. In the northern half of the Yokuts region, some tribes inhabited the foothills of the Coast Range to the West, where evidence shows they lived in the Carrizo Plain and created rock art in the Painted Rock area. The Yokuts are sometimes divided into the Southern Valley Yokuts, the Northern Valley Yokuts, and the Foothill Yokuts.

With numerous dialects, the Yokuts comprised as many as 60 separate hunter-gatherer tribes, speaking several related languages. They lived in many villages with up to 350 people in each tribe. Every tribe had a Head Chief, a sub-chief called Winatun, and a Village Chief.

The Valley Yokuts made canoe-shaped rafts from tule reeds tied together in bundles, often large enough to hold six people. They were pushed with long poles. The Foothill Yokuts made rafts by lashing two logs together.

Wood and stone were less plentiful in the San Joaquin Valley than in many parts of California. They obtained obsidian for knives and arrowheads through trade from the North and mountain areas. When obsidian was unavailable, they used other stones like chert, jasper, and quartz to make knives and scrapers. They sharpened animal bone pieces to make awls; they used pointed tools to punch holes and needles for sewing.

Tule reeds made many items, including baskets, cradles, and mats. They also made baby cradles, bowl-shaped cooking baskets, cone-shaped carrying baskets, flat basket trays, seed beaters, and water baskets. Some Foothill Yokuts made rough pottery bowls.

Men wore a piece of deerskin around their hips or went without clothes. Both rabbit skins and mud hen skins were used to make robes, which the people wore around their shoulders when the weather was cold. The Yokuts wore deer- or elk-skin moccasins only when walking in rough country. Yokut women wore a skirt made in two pieces: a narrow, fringed front part and a larger back piece. They made the skirts from tule reeds, marsh grass, or rabbit skins. They also wore a basket cap on their heads when carrying a burden basket, which was held on by a forehead strap.

The Yokuts lived in permanent houses most of the year, leaving only in summer to gather food. Single families usually made oval-shaped houses, framed with side poles tied to a central ridge pole and covered with tule mats. The Southern Valley tribes often built larger houses for as many as ten families. These houses had steep roofs, with roofs and walls covered with tule mats. In the large house, each family had a fireplace and a door. However, no walls separated one family from another. Houses in the foothills and dry valleys were sometimes built with the floor dug down a foot or two into the ground. In marshy areas, the floor was level with the ground. Both Valley and Foothills Yokuts built shade roofs, like porches, outside their houses so they could work outside.

Each village had a sweat house, dug down into the ground and covered with brush and earth. Only men used them. Southern Valley Yokuts did not have dance or assembly houses, though Northern Valley villages may have used them.

The Yokuts had two important religious ceremonies, including the annual mourning rite and the first fruit rite. Yokuts ceremonies also included puberty rites, which for boys involved using the hallucinogen toloache, made from the jimsonweed (Datura stramonium). Many Yokuts dances and ceremonies were held outside, with brush fences surrounding the dance area. Eagle feathers were an important part of the ceremonial decoration. They used eagle down to make ceremonial skirts. They made tall headdresses using magpie tail feathers around a base of crow feathers.

Shamans—medicine men —were important because they were believed to have supernatural powers, helped conduct ceremonies, and could treat the sick. They derived their power from spirit animals through dreams or vision quests. They cured and presided over ceremonies and charged large fees for cures. Shamans could use their power for good or evil, and if they used it in ways that dissatisfied the tribe, they could be executed.

After acquiring California from Mexico after the Mexican-American War, the federal government signed the first state-wide treaty, setting aside seven and a half percent of California’s land area for proposed Indian reservations. This was the first of 18 proposed treaties, none of which the U.S. Senate ratified.

Gold was discovered in California in 1849. The 1850s were devastating for the Yokuts, who American gold prospectors and settlers nearly destroyed. In 1853, malaria spread once again among the Yokuts, killing more natives.

The newly-organized state government took a different approach. In 1851, California Governor Peter Burnett said that unless the Indians were moved East of the Sierras, “a war of extermination would continue to be waged until the Indian race should become extinct.”

By 1854, what was left of the Yokuts tribe was forced to move to the Fort Tejon Reservation. A few years later, the reservation was attacked by white vigilantes who killed most of the inhabitants, and by 1859 the reservation was completely abandoned.

In the next decades, settlers and eventually the California State Militia would wage war against the Yokuts and other native tribes in what became known as the Californian Genocide. The Yokuts were reduced by about 93% between 1850 and 1900, with many survivors being forced into indentured servitude sanctioned by the California State Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.