KITANEMUK, Native American group historically inhabiting the Tehachapi Mountains and Antelope Valley of Southern California, one of the three Serrano (“mountain dweller”) Uto-Aztecan Indigenous peoples along with the Vanyume and the Serrano. The Kitanemuk were hunter-gatherers who roamed the mountains in small, mobile groups during the spring, summer, and fall, collecting pine nuts and acorns and hunting rabbits, and wintered in villages of between fifty to eighty people. They were organized into patrilineal clans, with each village being led by a hereditary chief.
Central to Kitanemuk cosmology is the distant and incorporeal figure of Canniqua, the creator of the universe and of other gods, and Tsuqqit, the Earth goddess and creator of mankind. Animals and the natural elements played a key role in Kitanemuk religion; they believed individuals were protected by guardian spirits such as animals or mountains.
Unlike the majority of North American Indigenous cultures, the Kitanemuk buried their dead rather than cremating them, often laying the bodies in specially woven cloth. They were also known to practice ceremonial cannibalism with the deceased: during the burial ceremony mourners would break off parts of the deceased’s brain to eat. The Kitanemuk were also skilled ceramists; by utilizing cow bones, horse dung, and oak bark as pottery-firing fuel, they were able to carefully regulate the temperature and thus the desired finish.
When the Kitanemuk were first contacted by Spanish explorers in the late eighteenth century, they numbered between five hundred and one thousand. In the course of colonization many Kitanemuk were relocated to other missionary sites in the valley, fragmenting their population, and smallpox and other diseases further ravaged them; by the twentieth century, scholars estimate, the population had dwindled to as low as one hundred and fifty. Today the Kitanemuk reside across Kern County in California and are federally recognized as the Tejon Indian Tribe. There are over 1,250 members, actively working to reconnect with their culture and revive their traditional language.