O'dam

The O'dam are the southeastern Tepehuán, the mountain branch of the Tepiman-speaking peoples whose heartland is the Sierra Madre Occidental of Durango around Mezquital. Tepehuán is a Nahuatl name meaning mountain dwellers; their ancestors drifted south from the Sonora-Arizona borderlands.

They stayed neutral in the Chichimeca War of 1550 to 1590, after which Franciscan and Jesuit missions gathered them into towns; epidemics between 1594 and 1617 may have cut their numbers by four fifths. In 1616 the messianic leader Quautlatas raised the Tepehuán Revolt, opening with an attack on a wagon train near Santa Catarina de Tepehuanes; by its defeat in 1620 perhaps four thousand Tepehuán were dead.

Drought and disease scattered further communities later in the seventeenth century. After the Jesuit expulsion of 1767 the O'dam villages lived in relative isolation, blending Catholic forms with older mountain rituals.