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“PEOPLE WHO FACE THE SUN”

By Paul Higgins

The Tataviam Indians arrived in the Santa Clarita Valley about 450 AD. They were Shoshone
speaking people that originally lived in the Northern Great Plain of
America. Why they left their homeland, why they traveled so far and why they decided to make this
area their new home is unknown. Certainly the abundant natural resources and climate of the valley
made it a very attractive and desirable place to live. The area was also a crossroads of two important
trade routes used by the Indians living in the area prior to the arrival of the Tataviam. One of these
routes linked the California Coast with Nevada, Arizona and other points East. The other connected
the San Joaquin Valley with the Los Angeles basin. Perhaps the Tataviams, who were very skillful
traders, had a desire to control these trade routes.

The Takic or Shoshone translation of the name Tataviam means “People Who Face the Sun.” This
name was applied because the majority of the Tataviam villages were built on the South facing slopes
of the Valley. The neighboring Chumash Indians referred to the Tataviam as the “AIliklik” people. The
Chumash word AIliklik, thought by some to be a derogatory term, means people who stammer or do
not speak clearly.
This prehistoric society numbering no more than two thousand people at anyone time lived in
about twenty various sized semi-permanent village sites. They occupied areas where the present
communities of Newhall, Castaic, Piru, Aqua Dulce and Lake Elizabeth are located today. Homes
were made of a cone shaped framework of willow poles covered with grass or other type of brush that
was tied in place. The structure, commonly referred to as a wikiup, resembled a large upside-down
basket. Houses were always built for optimum solar gain and usually near a source of water.

The Tataviam people performed no heavy labor and therefore were not large in size or extremely
strong. They were primarily seed gatherers, hunters of small game and fishermen. The world around
them was their source of food and clothing as well as the materials for their homes and tools. They
lived without agriculture and domestic animals. They learned to use every available source of
food without exhausting any. Rabbit was a daily meat as was deer, birds, squirrel, fish and insects.
Bear and coyote, thought to have a direct connection with the spiritual world, were never hunted or
used for food. Plants were used for food, seasoning, medicine, soap, ceremonial drugs and material
for clothing and baskets. Acorns and yucca were the most available and were therefore frequently
used.

Clothing for men consisted of a tool pouch tied around the waist with a string or a loincloth made of
deerskin or yucca fiber. Women wore a short skirt in the front and occasionally one in the back made
from animal skins, grass or yucca. These skirts, later referred to as California aprons, sometimes had
tar balls on the bottoms to hold them down and may have been decorated with shells, pine seeds
and abalone buttons. Children under the age of ten years usually wore nothing. During cold weather
blankets made from rabbit skins were worn as a robe in the daytime and used for bedding at night.
Tataviam ceremonies reflected everything that affected their lives; the weather, the amount and
availability of food, the sun, the moon, birth, puberty, marriage and especially death. What was
referred to as music was not a tune but more of a chant or hum in time to stamping feet. Flutes of
bone and elderberry wood, rattles of shells or deer hooves and rhythm sticks that were hit against the
hand completed the music.