Nuwuvi

The Nuwuvi, better known as the Southern Paiute, are Numic-speaking people of the Colorado River basin, spread across southern Nevada, northern Arizona and southern Utah in small family bands such as the Kaibab and Shivwits. Their Colorado River Numic language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family and was mutually intelligible with Ute.

Beside hunting and gathering, the Nuwuvi watered corn, squash, beans and sunflowers with reservoirs and irrigation ditches on spring floodplains, and women carried tall conical gathering baskets woven from willow. They were exposed to slave raids from the Ute and Navajo long before Europeans appeared. The first known outsiders to meet them were the Spanish friars Domínguez and Escalante, who crossed their Utah lands in 1776.