Comcaac

The Comcaac, whom the Spanish called Seri, are the nomadic sea-and-desert people of the Sonora coast on the Gulf of California. Their homeland took in Tiburon Island, known to them as Tahejoc, and San Esteban Island.

They moved in six patrilineal bands without agriculture or fixed towns, living from fishing, hunting and wild harvest. Their language, cmiique iitom, has no proven relative.

A Spanish slaving raid in the 1660s killed most of one band and carried off its children, opening a long era of warfare in which the Comcaac held out longer than any other Sonoran people. Jesuits failed to settle or convert them, and mid-eighteenth-century military expeditions never fully conquered them, though they were gradually driven onto a fraction of their lands.