Mono Erotic

The Mono are the people on both sides of the central and southern Sierra Nevada. East of the crest they lived around Mono Lake and down the Owens Valley, in dry country under a wall of granite. West of it they settled the oak and pine foothills above the San Joaquin, Kings and Kaweah rivers. What holds the two halves together is a language and a long habit of crossing the mountains on foot. Mono is a Numic language in the Uto-Aztecan family and a close relative of Northern Paiute. On the western slope it is an island, surrounded by the unrelated languages of the Yokuts and Miwok. Linguists have long pointed to this corner of eastern California as a likely starting point for the spread of Numic speech across the Great Basin.

The name is usually traced to a Yokuts word, and it points to trade. At Mono Lake, the Kutzadika'a gathered brine fly pupae from the shoreline and dried them into a food called kutsavi. They carried it west over the passes with obsidian, salt and pine nuts, and brought back acorns, shell beads and baskets. On the western side, life ran on black oak acorns, pounded in bedrock mortars that still dot the granite and leached into meal. Western Mono weavers became some of the most skilled basket makers in California. They coil sedge root, bracken fern root and redbud into patterned bowls, and weavers still make them.

East of the mountains, the Owens Valley bands dug ditches to flood stands of wild seed plants and edible tubers, irrigation that American surveyors recorded in the 1850s. Their name for the valley, Payahuunadü, means land of flowing water. That water later went south. After the Los Angeles Aqueduct opened in 1913, the valley dried out and much of its land passed to the city. Before that, the Gold Rush and the wars of the 1850s and 1860s had broken village life on both slopes, and in 1863 hundreds of Owens Valley people were marched to Fort Tejon.

Today the Mono live mostly in small tribal communities. On the western slope these include the Northfork, Big Sandy and Cold Springs rancherias, and in the east there are Paiute tribes at Bishop, Big Pine and other valley towns. Many are Christian, often alongside older beliefs, and gatherings built around dance, acorn cooking and basketry keep those practices public. The language has few fluent speakers left, and community language programs are working to change that.