Karok
The Karok , also written Karuk , are Indians of the Pacific northwest coast of North America, whose language belongs to the Hoka language group and who originally lived in what is now Oregon and California on the Klamath River and Salmon River . "Karok" is the Indian word for "upstream" and was first used in the form "Kahruk" by George Gibbs , who visited the tribe in 1851. It is in contrast to the term " yurok " for its neighbors, which means "downstream".
Their diet was based on salmon , which migrated twice a year, and the gathering of acorns and edible plants.
Culture
The men wore deerskin loincloths and deerskin moccasins with elk skin soles . The women wore knee-length deerskin shirts, which were open at the front and decorated, and a bowl-shaped hat like the Hupa .
Their huts were rectangular and were made of posts and split boards. The roof was flattened. There were a large number of villages on the banks of the Klamath and Salmon Rivers. Not all of them were inhabited at the same time, and some of them contained as many as half a dozen huts. Most of the villages consisted of two or three houses, not a few even of one house. The largest of them consisted of no more than 15 families, but because a family consisted of parents, unmarried daughters, sons, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, and perhaps some related orphans or slaves, such a village could have a significant population.
The religious customs of the Karok were similar to those of the neighboring Hupa and were based on the belief that the earth was inhabited in prehistoric times by a race of supernatural female beings. All ceremonies and innumerable actions in daily life were accompanied by the mumbled repetition of myths; usually they were very short, depending on the type of legend or the action. The most important ceremonies were the jumping dance and the dance of the white deer skin to protect the tribal land and the harvest.
The karok and yurok differed more in their ceremonies than in other activities. Although they both performed the deer skin and the jumping dances, the first lasted only two days and the second ten or eleven days with the Karok; while the yurok deer skin dance took ten days and the jumping dance took two days. The Karok, Hupa and Yurok had an annual ceremony at the beginning of the spring migration of salmon.
Demographics
The Karok population was put at around 1,500 tribal members in the 18th century. In the late 20th century, the Karok were one of the largest tribes in California, with an estimated 4,800 members, although the tribe owns little land. Karok Indians now live in the Orleans District in Humboldt County, the Happy Camp District, the Yreka District, at the bifurcation of the Salmon Region in Siskiyou County and in southern Oregon.
See also
literature
- Robert F. Heizer (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians . Volume 8: California. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC 1978, ISBN 0-16004-574-6 .
- Alfred L. Kroeber , Edward W. Gifford: Karok Myths. University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1980, ISBN 0-520-03870-3 .