Featured Tribe - Cahuillas - California

The Cahuillas are Takic-speaking peoples who reside in Southern California in what are now Riverside and San Diego counties. Many, but not all, of the Cahuilla peoples live on reservations-Cahuilla, Agua Caliente, Santa Rosa, Torres-Martinez, Cabeson, Morongo, Los Coyotes, Ramona, and Saboba. These reservations were established after many years of conflict with local and federal authorities in the 1870s. Today the Cahuillas number about twenty-four hundred people. Prior to European intrusion, however, when they occupied the better part of Riverside County and the northern portion of San Diego County, they numbered from six thousand to ten thousand people.

Within their language-speaking group, the Cahuillas were divided into about a dozen independent clans containing five hundred to twelve hundred people each. These clans controlled separate territories of several hundred square miles each and maintained their own political authority. Each clan was allied through ritual systems that provided political stability and networks for economic exchange. Each clan was dialectically different from the others.

Community beliefs were clearly stated in various song cycles (epic poems) and historical accounts that described a clan's sacred and secular history and provided guidelines for behavior. These beliefs were reinforced on a regular basis, usually annually, in clan ritual centers where the texts of the song cycles were presented in their entirety-a process requiring several days to complete. The most important parts of these gatherings were the nukil ceremonies, which honored those members of a clan who had died since the last nukil ritual had been performed.

For the Cahuillas, cosmological values and concepts were established when the world was created by Mukat. The Cahuilla creation story tells of the origin of the world, the death of god (Mukat), and the consequences of that death for humans (e.g., the need for death, social roles, and so forth). It also describes the basic concepts of supernatural power and its proper use in the contemporary world.

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