American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Virginia P. Miller. Ukomno'm: The Yuki Indians of Northern California. Los Altos, CA: BaHena Press, 1979. 112 pp. Paper. $6.95 This potent book is the most recent publication on the Ukomno'm (The People of the Valley, trans.), who are indigenous to Round Valley in the redwood bio-region of the coastal mountain ranges in Northwest California for at least 10,000 years. The first half of Ukomno'm is a condensed synopsis of the literature on this People. In the second half the book finds its essential significance and primary importance by filling one of many glaring gaps in what is known of the Yukian people: their demographic history and decimation. Virginia P. Miller's sources for the illumination of this macabre historical period (1855-65) of the Yuki tribe are the federal records and correspondences of government agents previously closed to the public and researchers alike; these sources and the uniqueness of chapter one makes Dr. Miller's Ukomno'm an example of the state of the art in indigenous demographic studies and a guide for further studies of the Yukian culture and in North American ethnohistory. Stephen Powers (Tribes of California 1877) is the first published writer to observe the People popularly known as the Yuki Indians. It seems he did not take into much consideration that this People had only been in contact with Euro-America since the autumn of 1851 when Indian Commissioner Colonel Redick McKee first came upon them along the Eel River, nor that they had been relegated to reservation life since 1856 when the decimation of their numbers, and their "dark age;' began. Consequently, Powers's derogatory commentary on this People in the early 1870s is at least unbecoming of the "healthy, vigorous" people of which Colonel KcKee wrote in September 1851, the "more intelligent and better formed" people in the Heintzelman letter of November 1855, and the "generally better looking set of Indians" reported by Simmon P. Storms in 1856. From Powers until the turn of the century there is nothing published specifically on the Yukian people by research scholars, although Alfred Kroeber, Pliny Goddard, Edward Gifford and others had made their acquaintance with this tribe.