Tepiman

Tepiman, also called Piman, is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan family whose languages stretch from southern Arizona along the Sierra Madre Occidental to Durango. Its members include O'odham, O'ob, O'otham and the poorly documented Tepecano. Tepehuan, a Nahuatl name meaning mountain people, covers three groups who call themselves O'dam, Audam and Odami.

These farming peoples of dispersed mountain villages stayed neutral in the Chichimeca War of 1550 to 1590. Jesuits opened missions among them from 1596. Repeated epidemics and forced labor in mines and haciendas fed the Tepehuan Revolt of 1616, led by the messianic Quautlatas with a broken cross as his symbol.

Spanish forces crushed the revolt by 1620 at heavy cost. The surviving Tepiman speakers remained in mission communities and remote valleys of the northwest.