Tolowa

The Tolowa, who call themselves Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni', are an Athabascan-speaking Native American nation of the far northwestern corner of California, their ancestral land of Taa-laa-waa-dvn running along the Pacific coast between Wilson Creek and the Smith River basin in Del Norte County. They held about eight permanent villages around Crescent City Harbor and Lake Earl, of which Yontocket was the foremost and a gathering place for ceremonies.

The name Tolowa was given to them by their Yurok neighbours to the south and means people of Lake Earl, while their own word Hush means simply a person. Their language, Chetco-Tolowa, belongs to the Pacific Coast branch of the Athabascan family within Na-Dené.

The large plank-house villages of the coast were already prospering when European and American ships began to visit the region in the late eighteenth-century maritime fur trade.