Nuwuvu

The Nuwuvu are the Chemehuevi, the southernmost branch of the Southern Paiute, who call themselves Nüwü, meaning the people, or Tantáwats, the southern men. The name Chemehuevi was given them by their Mojave and Quechan neighbours. Their ancestors spread out of a southern Sierra Nevada homeland beginning around two thousand years ago.

Living off the sparse eastern Mojave Desert, they moved in tiny nomadic bands, each tied to a mountain range or valley, including the Howaits in the Ivanpah Mountains and the Yagats along the Amargosa River. They traded willow baskets of tight three-rod coiling across the desert.

The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber estimated that the Chemehuevi, Kawaiisu and Koso together numbered about 1,500 people in 1770, on the eve of sustained contact. In post-contact times they gathered increasingly along the Colorado, above all in the Chemehuevi Valley that bears their name.