Yana Erotic

The Yana were a people of the broken foothill country east of the upper Sacramento River, in what are now Tehama and Shasta counties in northern California. They held that ground for thousands of years and were destroyed as a functioning society within roughly twenty years of the gold rush. Descendants survive and are enrolled today with the Redding Rancheria and the Pit River Tribe, but the villages, the seasonal round, and the last fluent speakers are gone.

They called themselves after their own word for person. Their language was an isolate, unrelated to anything spoken by the Wintu to the west or the Maidu to the south, though linguists have long tried to fit it into the proposed Hokan grouping without settling the matter. Yana carried one of the most thoroughly documented cases of gendered speech anywhere: most words had two forms, a fuller one used by men speaking to men, and a clipped one used by women and by men addressing women. Four divisions spoke it, Northern, Central, and Southern Yana, plus the Yahi at the southern end, whose dialect was distinct enough that neighbors noticed.

Their country was poorer than the valley floor and they lived accordingly, moving between winter earth lodges and summer brush shelters, taking salmon on the creeks, deer in the canyons, and acorns in quantity. Valley peoples regarded them as tough and territorial, which the terrain more or less required.

The collapse was fast and deliberate. In August 1864, after the killing of two settler women near Oak Run, vigilante parties hunted down and killed several hundred Yana in a matter of days. Massacres at Three Knolls and Kingsley Cave finished most of what remained. A handful of Yahi then did something extraordinary: they withdrew into the Mill Creek and Deer Creek canyons and stayed hidden for over forty years, in country crossed regularly by ranchers who believed them extinct.

The last of them walked out near Oroville in 1911, starving and alone. He would not speak his own name, so anthropologists called him Ishi, the Yahi word for man. He spent five years at the university museum in San Francisco, recording vocabulary, songs, and toolmaking for Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir before tuberculosis killed him in 1916. Most of what is known about Yana life comes from those recordings.