The Tübatulabal (English pronunciation: /təˈbɑːtələbɑːl/, like "to bottle a ball") are Native Americans whose ancestral home was in the Kern River basin, in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
The Tübatulabal spoke an isolated Uto-Aztecan language. However, in most respects their traditional culture was more similar to that of central California groups, such as the Yokuts, than to that of the Tübatulabal's Great Basin kinsmen.
Acorns, piñon nuts, and game animals were key elements in Tubatulabal subsistence.
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Population
Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. (See Population of Native California.) Alfred L. Kroeber (1925:883) put the 1770 population of the Tübatulabal as 1,000. Erminie W. Voegelin (1938:39) considered Kroeber's estimate too high, estimating the Tübatulabal population at the time of initial Euro-American settlement, ca. 1850, as 200-300.
Kroeber reported the population of the Tübatulabal in 1910 as 150. Yamamoto estimated the population at 900 in 2000.[1]
Today about 400 Tubatulabal people reside in the Kern River Valley of California. 500 more live in surrounding areas. Many are enrolled in the Tule River Indian Tribe of the Tule River Reservation.[1]
Notes
- ^ California Indians and Their Reservations. SDSU Library. (retrieved 25 July 2009)
References
- Kroeber, A. L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78. Washington, D.C.
- Smith, Charles R. 1978. "Tubatulabal". In California, edited by Robert F. Heizer, pp. 437–445. Handbook of North American Indians, William C. Sturtevant, general editor, vol. 8. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
- Voegelin, Erminie W. 1938. "Tübatulabal Ethnography". Archaeological Records 2:1-90. University of California Press, Berkeley.
See also
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