Salinan

The Salinan are an Indigenous people of the Central Coast of California, whose ancestral lands covered the southern Salinas Valley and the Santa Lucia Range. They lived as hunter-gatherers in small, loosely organized bands, relying on acorns, fish, shellfish and game. Their own name means People of the Oaks, while Salinan was given to them by the Spanish from the Salinas River.

Their language was a linguistic isolate, sometimes tentatively grouped with the Hokan family. The Spanish built the missions of San Antonio de Padua in 1771 and San Miguel Arcángel in 1797 in their territory, around which most Salinan came to live. Their numbers fell steeply under the mission system and the epidemics that accompanied it.