Kawaiisu

The Kawaiisu are a Southern Numic people of the Tehachapi Valley and the southern Sierra Nevada, who also ranged across the northern Mojave Desert on gathering trips. They call themselves Nüwa, the people; Kawaiisu and Tehachapi Indians are names taken from their Yokuts neighbours.

Split into Desert and Mountain groups, they wintered in permanent villages of sixty to a hundred people and scattered into small foraging bands in summer, living mainly on acorns and buckeye flour, deer and desert mesquite. They joined Yokuts drivers in communal antelope hunts, and their mountains hold petroglyphs shared by the Numic peoples of the region.

Their oral history and linguists alike suggest they may have come from the desert into the Tehachapis as early as two thousand years ago. In 1770 the Kawaiisu, Chemehuevi and Koso together were estimated at about 1,500 people.