The Wukchumni Yokuts and Marie Wilcox's Dictionary
Near Three Rivers, California
The people who knew this river canyon longest were the Wukchumni, a branch of the Yokuts who lived in the Kaweah River watershed for thousands of years. The Wukchumni hunted deer in the canyon country above Three Rivers, fished the Kaweah, traded with Paiute people over the high passes, and traveled seasonally between lower winter camps and higher summer pastures. They were not a single isolated village but a network of related communities spread across the foothill and mountain zones of the southern Sierra.
Spanish missionaries began pushing into Yokuts territory in the late eighteenth century, and disease devastated populations throughout the region. By the time American settlers arrived in the eighteen fifties, the Wukchumni had already been dramatically reduced in number. The establishment of the Tule River Reservation in eighteen seventy three created a federal land base for some Yokuts people, though many Wukchumni had no formal reservation.
The Wukchumni language nearly died in the twentieth century. By the early twenty-tens, she was the last remaining fully fluent speaker: a woman named Marie Wilcox, born in nineteen thirty three, who had grown up hearing the language spoken by her elders. Working with computer help, Marie spent more than twenty years creating a comprehensive Wukchumni dictionary.
She kept teaching the language, with a daughter, until her death in twenty twenty one, and others now carry it on.
