While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
Karok (karuk,
'upstream'; they have no name for themselves other than that for 'men' or
'people', arar, whence Arra-arra, Ara-ara, etc.). The
name by which the Indians of the Quoratean family have, as a tribe, been
generally called. They lived on Klamath river from Redcap creek to Indian
creek, north west California. Below them on the river were the Yurok,
above them the Shasta, to their east were other Shasta tribes, while on
the west they were separated by a spur of the Siskiyou mountains from the
Yurok and the Athapascan Tolowa. Salmon river, a tributary of the Klamath,
was not Karok territory except for about 5 miles from its mouth,-but was
held mainly by Shastan tribes. While the Karok language is fundamentally
different front the languages of the adjacent Hupa and Yurok, the Karok
people closely resemble these two tribes in mode of life and culture, and
any description given of the latter will apply to the Karok. They differ
from the Yurok principally in two points: One, that owing to the absence
of redwood they do not make canoes but buy them from the Yurok; the other,
that they celebrate a series of annual ceremonies called "making the
world," which are held at Panamenik, Katimin, and Inam, with a similar
observance at Amaikiara, while the Yurok possess no strictly analogous
performances. The Karok had no divisions other than villages, and while
these extended along the entire extent of their territory, three important
clusters are recognizable, in each of which there was one village at which
certain ceremonies were held that were observed nowhere else. Panamenik,
on the site of Orleans Bar, and several other settlements formed the first
group; the second was about the mouth of Salmon river and comprised
Amaikiara, Ashipak, Ishipishi, Katimin, Shanamkarak, and others; in the
third and northernmost group the most important villages were Inam, at the
mouth of Clear creek, and Asisufuunuk at Happy Camp.
In the first two groups a single dialect was
spoken; in the last, the farthest upstream, a divergent dialect called
Karakuka was employed.
