Acaxee

The Acaxee were a Taracahitic-speaking people of the Uto-Aztecan family who held the Sierra Madre Occidental of eastern Sinaloa and north-western Durango. Before the Spanish came they numbered perhaps twenty thousand, living in dispersed extended-family farmsteads grouped into autonomous chiefdoms that accepted a common leader only in wartime; they farmed maize and beans where the steep land allowed and hunted and gathered otherwise.

A warlike people, they feuded constantly with their neighbours the Xixime, and Spanish chroniclers accused both groups of eating slain enemies. The conquest of Sinaloa in 1529 to 1531 opened their mountains to encomienda raids and Old World epidemics, and in December 1601 an elder named Perico led the Acaxee Rebellion, which was crushed.

Jesuit missionaries then began their conversion in 1602, and over the colonial centuries the Acaxee merged into the mestizo society of Nueva Vizcaya.