Opata

Opata, whose speakers called it Teguima, is a Uto-Aztecan language of the inland valleys of northeastern and central Sonora, closely related to Eudeve. From about 1350 to 1550 the Opata lived in independent irrigation statelets of multi-story adobe towns along the rivers.

They fought off Francisco de Ibarra's expedition of 1565, but epidemics broke up the statelets. Jesuits opened the first mission in 1628; the Opata supplied soldiers for Spanish campaigns against the Apache.

They joined the Indian rising of 1740 and rose again in 1820, when three hundred Opata warriors routed a thousand soldiers and destroyed a mining town near Tonichi before their leaders were captured and executed. By the early nineteenth century most Opata were bilingual and Spanish was displacing their tongue, known chiefly through missionary vocabularies and grammars.