Nongatl

The Nongatl are one of the four Eel River Athapaskan groups of northwestern California, alongside the Wailaki, Lassik and Sinkyone, all speaking dialects of the Wailaki language within the Pacific Coast Athabaskan branch. Their name is a Hupa word meaning the Athapaskans to the south.

By the sixteenth century these Athabaskan newcomers, kin to the Hupa and the Mattole, held their historic country in the basin of the Van Duzen River, together with Yager Creek and Larabee Creek, where at least thirty-five villages stood. These group names were dialect labels fixed by later ethnographers rather than hard tribal borders, and through 1837 the Nongatl kept to their river valleys beyond the reach of missions and outside settlement.