Yuki people
The Yuki (also known as Yukiah) are an indigenous people of California, whose traditional territory is around Round Valley, Mendocino County. Today they are enrolled members of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of the Round Valley Reservation. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Yuki called themselves "Ukomno'om," meaning "valley people." The exonym "Yuki" may derive from the Wintu word meaning "foreigner" or "enemy." Yuki tribes are thought to have settled as far south as Hood Mountain in present-day Sonoma County. History. In 1856, the US government established the Indian reservation of Nome Cult Farm (later to become  Round Valley Indian Reservation) at Round Valley. Language. The Yuki language is no longer spoken. It is distantly related to the Wappo language, forming the Yukian family with it. The Yuki people had a quaternary (4-based) counting system, based on counting the spaces between the fingers, rather than the fingers themselves. Population. Scholarly estimates have varied substantially for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California, as historians and anthropologists have tried to evaluate early documentation. Alfred L. Kroeber estimated the 1770 population of the Yuki proper, "Huchnom", and Coast Yuki as 2,000, 500, and 500, respectively , or 3,000 in all. Sherburne F. Cook initially raised this total slightly to 3,500. Subsequently, he proposed a higher estimate of 9,730 Yuki. Benjamin Madley wrote that "the Yuki suffered a cataclysmic population decline under United States rule. Between 1854 and 1864, settlement policies, murders, abductions, massacres, rape-induced venereal diseases, and willful neglect at Round Valley Reservation reduced them from perhaps 20,000 to several hundred." In his work, Madley argues that Yuki history constitutes a clear-cut example of genocide. He cites the fact that other than venereal diseases introduced by Europeans, stating that there is no evidence of  any epidemic that would have caused such drastic population decline among the Yuki between 1854 and 1864. His research thus challenges the idea that the indirect effects of European colonization were the leading cause of population decline and mass death for Native Americans. Intermarriage among neighboring tribes after their forced relocation to the Round Valley Reservation resulted in large numbers of Native Americans with mixed ancestry. Many of these people are descendants of many local tribes and have come to be called Round Valley Indian Tribes. In the 2010 census, 569 people claimed Yuki ancestry. Two hundred fifty-five of  them were full-blooded. Ethnobotany. They use the large roots of Carex to make baskets.