From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Original territory of the Yuchi Tribe

The Yuchi, also spelled Euchee and Uchee and Yoshi, are a Native American Indian tribe previously living in the eastern Tennessee River valley in Tennessee, northern Georgia and northern Alabama who now primarily live in the northeastern Oklahoma area. Their own name for themselves is Tsoyaha - "Children of the Sun". Their population plummeted in the 18th century due to foreign diseases and war with the Cherokee. In 2005 there are approximately 3,000 Yuchi people.

In the early 19th century they were forcibly "removed" along with the Muscogee people to Oklahoma. Historically, the Yuchi have always been a separate people from other tribes though they have often been grouped with and treated with other people, most importantly, with the Muscogee.

Now, most Yuchi are of mixed-tribe descent and many are citizens of and enrolled with the Muscogee Nation, although many are citizens of other tribes, such as the Shawnee or Sac-and-Fox. Yuchi people have tried to attain Federal Recognition from the United States in the last decades of the 20th century, but this doesn't appear to have been successful. There have been organizations which have striven to be representative tribal governments, however none have had near-universal support to date.

The Yuchi language is a linguistic isolate, unrelated to any other known Native American tongue. Their word tybee (salt) lives as the name of Tybee Island. The Yuchi pronunciation of this word is similar to "duh bee" as pronounced by a North American English speaker.

The Yuchi people and language are the subject of a chapter in Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, a book on endangered languages by Mark Abley.

• Yuchi language

• Sam Story

Mark Abley Spoken Here : Travels Among Threatened Languages. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.

Jason Jackson Yuchi Ceremonial Life: Performance, Meaning, and Tradition in a Contemporary American Indian Community. University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

Frank Speck Ethnology of the Yuchi Indians (reprint). University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

• Who Were the Mysterious Yuchi of Tennessee and the Southeast? at Yuchi.org
• Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin in the Indian Territory pp. 327, 333-335 early ethnographer's account of learning Yuchi language in 1883 in a Yuchi settlement 55 miles from Muskogee, Oklahoma. Electronic record maintained by Library of Congress, accessed January 15, 2007.