Nicoleño

The Nicoleño (nickname: woes ) were a Native American tribe who lived on the island of San Nicolas , one of the eight Channel Islands in California .

The tribe occasionally traded with tribes on the neighboring islands; According to the few surviving fragments, his language belonged to the Uto-Aztec language family . The Chumash Indians on the mainland referred to the tribe as Niminocotch and the island as Ghalas-at .

In 1602, the explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno named the island, which was first sighted by Europeans in 1542. Little is known about the further history of the island, but missionaries made considerable efforts to Christianize the inhabitants of the Channel Islands. After a massacre in 1814 by fur hunters of the Russian-American company , the Nicoleño were so decimated that they threatened to die out. It is said that Franciscans of the Santa Barbara Mission asked for the rescue of the Indians, but this is questionable as the mission was empty at the time. What is certain is that the schooner Peor es Nada evacuated almost the entire Indian tribe - probably less than a dozen people - to the mainland in 1835. Only one woman could not be located before a storm broke out. The missing woman from San Nicolas therefore lived alone on the island for eighteen years until she, too, was rescued. The Nicoleño who were brought to the mainland, especially to the San Gabriel Arcángel Mission , soon died there, mainly of infectious diseases.