Maiduan

The Maiduan peoples, whose name means person in their own Penutian-family tongues, held the central Sierra Nevada and the upper Sacramento Valley around the Feather and American Rivers. They were divided into four nearly unintelligible language groups: the Mountain Maidu, Konkow, Chico Maidu and Nisenan.

In small autonomous villages led by heads of the men's Kuksu cult, they lived by hunting and gathering, tending oak groves with controlled burns and leaching acorn meal for winter stores. Mountain bands built circular earth lodges roofed with pine bark, moving to brush shelters in summer. Their Kuksu big-head dances and spring Bear Dance honored a world overseen by World-maker and the trickster Coyote.

Beyond the reach of the coastal missions, they saw few Spaniards beyond occasional patrols, until the malaria epidemic of 1833 swept the Sacramento Valley and emptied many of their villages.