Ko'leew

The Kiliwa, who call themselves Ko'leeu, are an Indigenous people of northern Baja California, whose traditional territory stretched across the peninsula from San Felipe on the Gulf of California to San Quintín on the Pacific.

They lived by hunting and gathering without agriculture: pit-roasted agave was their staff of life, supplemented in the high country by autumn acorns and pine nuts. Rabbits and deer were taken in communal drives into nets.

Their first meeting with Europeans was with Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo's ships at San Quintín in 1542, but serious contact resumed two centuries later, with the Jesuit Wenceslaus Linck in 1766. Dominican friars founded the mission of Santo Domingo in 1775 and San Pedro Mártir in 1794; by the time Mexico won independence in 1821, disease and mission life had reduced the Kiliwa population to a remnant.