THE YUKI
THE COAST YUKI
The Coast Yuki have been the subject of an admirable ethnographic study by Gifford (1939), who has assembled substantially all the data extant in modern times pertaining to families and villages. He shows very clearly that this tribe occupied its villages only in a transitory manner, that it had summer beach camps and inland winter settlements. To quote Gifford's words concerning the point (p. 296):
I use the terms camp, hamlet, and village interchangeably in this paper. No site seems to have been occupied the year around. All were more or less temporary. The presence of an assembly house marked the more frequently occupied sites.
Hence it is necessary to examine Gifford's compilation of sites with as much care as possible in order to determine how many villages can properly be ascribed to the tribe.
It is also made clear in Gifford's paper that each of the eleven Coast Yuki groups had its own headman and ceremonial house. Each group had a frontage of seacoast together with a strip of territory which extended inland to the eastern limit of the tribe. Within this territory the group moved about with considerable freedom.
The following is a digest of the inhabited sites for the eleven groups. The groups are numbered (but the names omitted) in the order in which they appear on pages 296 to 303 of Gifford's paper.
1. One village is mentioned but no camp sites. For the group, therefore, the maximum number of sites occupied at any given time must be one.