The Bay Miwok are a cultural and linguistic group of Miwok, a Native American people in Northern California who live in Contra Costa County.

The Miwok family consists of the Western Miwok languages (Lake and Coast) and the Eastern languages (Bay, Plains, Northern Sierra, Central Sierra and Southern Sierra).

Bay Miwok territory stretched from the Oakland-Berkeley hills in the west to the Mt. Diablo foothills and San Joaquin delta in the east. A particularly sacred site in the mythology of the indigenous peoples of the East Bay is Mt. Diablo, known as Tuyshtak in the Chochenyo language, and understood to be the site of creation of the world and ...

Apr 5, 2017 · The Miwok ( meaning ‘people’ or ‘person’) are aboriginal members of four Native American tribal groups associated philologically. They originally belonged to the region that we come across as Northern California at present.

From 1827 to 1844 a series of malaria and smallpox epidemics in Central California contributed to the end of resistance in Bay Miwok territory. Remnants of the tribes went to work on local ranches or fled to the Central Valley.

Before European contact, the Bay Miwok language was one of several indigenous languages of the Bay Area, a thriving network of indigenous cultures connected through trade, intermarriage, cultural ceremonies, and diplomacy.

The Miwok (also spelled Miwuk, Mi-Wuk, or Me-Wuk) are members of four linguistically related Native American groups indigenous to what is now Northern California, who traditionally spoke one of the Miwok languages in the Utian family.

The term “Bay Miwok” was introduced by James A. Bennyhoff in a 1961 Ph.D. dissertation. Bennyhoff noted that Saclan shared linguistic features with the languages of four other local East By groups, the Chupcans, Julpuns, Ompins, and Volvons.

Bay Miwok (Saclan, Saklan) was one of the Miwok languages spoken in California, around San Francisco Bay. All of the population has shifted to English.

Ohlone and Miwok are modern designations that group together distinct tribes of Native people based on the languages they spoke and their broad-based cultural affiliations. This map shows the homelands of the tribes of the places now known as the San Francisco Bay Area.