Serrano Indians
The territory of the Serrano included the entire San Bernardino range of mountains, west into the San Gabriel mountains to North Baldy (Mt Baden-Powell), south across the San Bernardino Valley and eastward to near 29 Palms and the Oasis of Mara.Traditional Territory
The territorial claims of the different ethnic groups who occupied the Mojave and ...Oral History
A version of the Serrano creation story told by elder Dorothy Ramon describes ...
Claims Case Boundaries
the descriptions agreed to by the tribes themselves in ...
Subsistence Resources
Plant Resources
Bean and Saubel's Temelpakh (1972), which pertains to the ethnobotany of the Cahuilla contains much information applicable to the Serrano as well. ...
Animal Resources
Dorothy Ramon has provided information about how the Serrano traditionally went about procuring and using ...
Material Culture, Technology
The Serranos acquired the many species of large and small animals available in the area with ...Trade, Exchange, Storage
Their principal trading partners were the Mojave to the east and the Gabrielino to the west, but they also traded with ...Social structure
... each of whom belonged to either of two exogamous moieties, Coyote or Wildcat. Each clan was composed of ...Religion, World View
Serrano world view, like its culture in general, is less well known than that of some of their neighbors, such as the ...History
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Mission Period
The Serrano were a fairly numerous people when the Spanish arrived in 1769, but beginning about 1790, the ...
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American Period
It has been suggested that the Serrano left the area in the early 1860s when a smallpox epidemic struck ...
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Present Day Serrano
Morongo Indian Reservation probably has more Serranos than any other reservation, but since many ...
Major Sources
Serrano links
Sub-groups of the Serrano; Vanyume, Kitanemuk
More about the Serrano
Native Location: Mojave Desert and the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California
Food: Acorn, Manzanita berries, pine nuts, yucca, deer, rabbit
Language: Takic branch of Uto-Aztecan
Cultural Notes: They were once sedentary hunter-gatherers. Serrano is Spanish for "mountaineer", but they called themselves Yuharetum, which means "people of the pines."
