The Vanyume or Desert Serrano are an
Indigenous people of Southern California. Traditional Vanyume territory extended along the
Mojave River from the Eastern
Mojave Desert
The Mojave Desert (; ; ) is a desert in the rain shadow of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains and Transverse Ranges in the Southwestern United States. Named for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, indigenous Mohave people, it is located pr ...
to present day
Victorville and may have included portions of southern
Antelope Valley. The major village of
Wá’peat was part of this area.
Though the Vanyume were closely related to the neighboring
Serrano people linguistically and culturally, the two groups were politically distinct prior to European contact. Because all documented Vanyume villages had been abandoned prior to the development of modern ethnographic fieldwork, ethnographic information on the Vanyume is limited.
Name
The first European to mention the Vanyume, Father
Francisco Garcés, referred to the group using the
Mohave exonym
An endonym (also known as autonym ) is a common, name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language, or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate them ...
''Beñemé''. ''Vanyumé,'' a variation of the term, was later adopted by ethnographer
Alfred Louis Kroeber.
Pre-contact
Population
A. L. Kroeber described the Vanyume population as "very small" at the time of European contact. A 2017 analysis found that the group could have comprised as many as 700 people at the time of contact.
Language
The Vanyume traditionally spoke the
Vanyume language, a now-extinct and poorly attested
Uto-Aztecan language belonging to the
Takic branch. The Vanyume language was likely very closely related to the
Serrano language, though it may have shared features with the neighboring
Kitanemuk language
Kitanemuk is an extinct Northern Uto-Aztecan language of the Serran branch. It is very closely related to Serrano, and may have been a dialect. Before its extinction, it was spoken in the San Gabriel Mountains and foothill environs of Southern ...
, and was spoken to the north of Serrano territory. It was documented by
Alfred Kroeber in the early 20th century, who reported it to be a dialect of Serrano, part of a
dialect continuum
A dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of Variety (linguistics), language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulat ...
with Kitanemuk.
Population decline
Between the late 18th and early 20th centuries, the Vanyume population dramatically declined.
Missionization
Beginning in 1790, a number of Vanyume people were baptized at
Mission San Fernando and
Mission San Gabriel. The period between 1811 and 1814 saw the most rapid missionization, a process likely aided through military intimidation. A 1811 effort may have attempted to forcefully round up and relocate the Vanyume and Serrano.
Compared to their upriver counterparts, Vanyume villages on the lower Mojave river enjoyed relative freedom from Spanish influence and missionization.
In late 1810s, a number of Vanyume settlements were depopulated and their residents killed by warring Spanish and Mohave people.
Other factors
Indigenous Californians interviewed by ethnographers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries describe incidents of trade-related violence with the Mohave as a key factor in the decline and dispersion of Vanyume populations. These conflicts likely occurred around the 1830s.
A number of living individuals are of Vanyume ancestry.
References
{{Indigenous peoples of California
Indigenous peoples of California
Mission Indians
History of the Mojave Desert region
Uto-Aztecan peoples