Pascua Yaqui Tribe

The Pascua Yaqui Tribe is a federally recognized tribe of Yaqui Native Americans in southern Arizona.

Descended from the ancient Uto-Azteca people of Mexico, the ancestors of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe first settled in the United States near Nogales and south Tucson. In the late 19th century, the tribe began to expand into settlements north of Tucson in an area they named Pascua Village, and in Guadalupe, near Tempe. They gained recognition by the United States government on September 18, 1978.

History

In 552 AD, Yaquis were living in family groups along the Yaqui River (Yoem Vatwe) north to the Gila River, where they gathered wild desert foods, hunted game and cultivated corn, beans, and squash. Yaquis traded native foods, furs, shells, salt, and other goods with many indigenous groups of central North America. Among these groups are the Shoshone, the Comanche, the Pueblos, the Pimas, the Aztecs, and the Toltec. Yaquis roamed extensively in pre-Columbian times and sometimes settled among other native groups like the Zunis. After contact with non-Natives, the Yaquis came into an almost constant 400 year conflict with Spanish colonists and the later Mexican republic, a period known as the Yaqui Wars, which ended in 1929. The wars drove many Yaquis north from Mexico and into Arizona.

Yaqui

The Yaqui or Yoeme are Native Americans who inhabit the valley of the Río Yaqui in the Mexican state of Sonora and the Southwestern United States. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe is based in Tucson, Arizona. Yaqui people also live elsewhere in the southwestern United States, especially Nevada and California.

Language

The Yaqui language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan language family. Yaqui speak a Cahitan language, a group of about 10 mutually-intelligible languages formerly spoken in much of the states of Sonora and Sinaloa. Most of the Cahitan languages are extinct. Only the Yaqui and Mayo still speak their language. About 15,000 Yaqui speakers live in Mexico and 1,000 in the United States, mostly Arizona.

The Yaqui call themselves Hiaki or Yoeme, the Yaqui word for person (yoemem or yo'emem meaning "people"). The Yaqui call their homeland Hiakim, from which some say the name "Yaqui" is derived. They may also describe themselves as Hiaki Nation or Pascua Hiaki, meaning "The Easter People", as most had converted to Catholicism under Jesuit influence in colonial Mexico. Many folk etymologies account for how the Yoeme came to be known as the "Yaqui".