The Yokuts are an ethnic group of Native Americans native to central California. Before European contact, the Yokuts consisted of up to 60 tribes speaking several related languages. Some of their descendants prefer to refer to themselves by their respective tribal names; they reject the term Yokuts, saying that it is an exonym invented by English-speaking settlers and historians. Conventional sub-groupings include the Foothill Yokuts, Northern Valley Yokuts, and Southern Valley Yokuts.
Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. Alfred L. Kroeber in 1925 put the 1770 population of the Yokuts at 18,000. Several subsequent investigators suggested that the total should be substantially higher. Robert F. Heizer and Albert B. Elsasser 1980 suggested that the Yokuts had numbered about 70,000. They had one of the highest regional population densities in pre-contact North America. The 1850s were a devastating time for California Indians due to the incursion of European-American settlers into their homelands, who enslaved or killed the natives in great number. The federal government, which had recently acquired California after defeating Mexico in the Mexican War, signed a treaty defining a proposed reservation and two hundred head of cattle per year. The US Senate failed to ratify any of the eighteen treaties in a secret vote cast on July 8, 1852, with every member either abstaining or voting no. The result of the vote was not made public until 1905. 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.' Over the course of the next 50 years, settlers and eventually the California State Militia would wage war on the Yokuts and other native tribes in what became known as the Californian Genocide. The Yokuts were reduced by around 93% between 1850 and 1900, with many of the survivors being forced into indentured servitude sanctioned by the California StateAct for the Government and Protection of Indians. A few Valley Yokuts remain, the most prominent tribe among them being the Tachi. Kroeber estimated the population of the Yokuts in 1910 as 600. Today about 2000 Yokuts are enrolled in the federally recognized tribe. An estimated 600 Yokuts are said to belong to unrecognized tribes.
The Yokuts tribe of California are known to have engaged in trading with other California tribes of Native Americans in the United States including coastal peoples like, for example, the Chumash tribe of the Central California coast, and they are known to have traded plant and animal products.
Internal conflicts within the Chukchansi tribe near Yosemite
On 5 April 2015, it was reported that members of the Chukchansi tribe near Yosemite have been disenrolling other members from the tribe for decades, so that the tribe's casino profits go to fewer people. In the autumn of 2014, several disenrolled Chukchansi tribe members arrived at the Chukchansi Gold Resort & Casino armed with guns, and violence ensued. As a result, a federal judge ordered that the casino be shut down.
