In this hypothesis, about 7000 BCE, a Hokan-speaking people migrated into the valley and mountain regions around Clear Lake, and their language evolved into Proto-Pomo. This area was where coastal redwood forests met with interior valleys with mixed woodlands. One theory places the ancestral community from which the Pomoan languages and cultures are descended in the Sonoma County, California region. Instead, they lived in small groups or bands linked by lineage and marriage.Īccording to some linguistic theories, the Pomo people descend from the Hokan-speaking people. They were not socially or politically linked as a unified group. The people called Pomo were originally linked by location, language, and cultural expression. Map of the historical distribution of the Pomoan languages with neighboring groups indicated By 1877, the use of Pomo had been extended in English to mean the entire people known today as the Pomo. In the Northern Pomo dialect, -pomo or -poma was used as a suffix after the names of places, to mean a subgroup of people of the place. It may have referred to local deposits of the red mineral magnesite, used for red beads, or to the reddish earth and clay, such as hematite, mined in the area. It originally meant 'those who live at red earth hole' and was once the name of a village in southern Potter Valley near the present-day community of Pomo. The name Pomo derives from a conflation of the Pomo words and. One small group, the Northeastern Pomo, lived in the vicinity of present-day Stonyford in Colusa County, separated from the core Pomo area by lands inhabited by Yuki and Wintuan speakers. Historical Pomo territory in Northern California was large, bordered by the Pacific Coast to the west, extending inland to Clear Lake, and mainly between Cleone and Duncans Point. The Pomo are an Indigenous people of California. Kuksu, Messiah Cult, traditional Pomo religion United States ( California: Mendocino County, Sonoma Valley, Napa Valley, Lake County, Colusa County) Pomo woman in traditional regalia in 2015

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