The Yokuts of the Kern River

Along the Kern River, before any American or Spanish presence in the region, the Yokuts peoples maintained one of the densest concentrations of Indigenous population in what would become California. The Yokuts were not a single unified nation but rather a linguistic family of dozens of distinct groups, each with its own territory, political structure, and ceremonial practice. The groups living along the Kern River and at the base of the Sierra Nevada foothills are known in the scholarship as the Foothill Yokuts, and their relationship to this river system was the organizing fact of their material existence.

The Kern River and the wetlands of the valley floor produced fish, waterfowl, and tule roots in quantities sufficient to support permanent settlements, and the Yokuts villages along the lower Kern were places of relative permanence, not seasonal camps. Trade routes connected the valley communities to the Kitanemuk in the Tehachapi Mountains, to the Tubatulabal peoples in the upper Kern River canyon, and through those connections to the coastal peoples on the other side of the mountains. Shell beads from the Pacific coast moved inland along routes that ran through this drainage.

Spanish missionaries and soldiers reached the Kern River valley in the late eighteenth century. Spanish expeditions from the coastal missions entered the southern San Joaquin Valley, and the reports those expeditions produced described Yokuts villages of several hundred people each. The contact was destructive from the beginning. Disease preceded formal colonization, moving faster than the missionaries, and the population the expeditions found was already a fraction of what it had been.

By the time American settlers reached Kern County in the mid-nineteenth century, the Yokuts population had collapsed to a small number relative to its pre-contact level. Colonel Baker's hay camp in the eighteen sixties was built on land that had been Yokuts territory within living memory of the people still living there.

The Tubatulabal and Yokuts descendant communities in Kern County are still here. Several hold federal recognition, and others are still seeking it. The Kern River that flows from the Sierra Nevada into and through this city is the same river that sustained their communities for thousands of years before the irrigation diversions, the dams, and the oil fields changed the valley floor into something that would have been unrecognizable to anyone who lived here before.