Jumano Indians

The Jumano people were a prominent indigenous tribe or several tribes, who inhabited a large area of western Texas, adjacent New Mexico, and northern Mexico, especially near the La Junta de los Rios region with its large settled Indian population. Spanish explorers first recorded encounters with the Jumano in 1581; later expeditions noted them in a broad area of the Southwest and the Great Plains. The last historic reference was in a 19th-century oral history, but their population had declined by the early 18th century.

Scholars have generally argued that the Jumano disappeared as a distinct people by 1750 due to infectious disease, the slave trade, and warfare, with remnants absorbed by the Apache or Comanche, but as of 2008, self-identified Apache-Jumano (Jumano Ndé - “Red Mud Painted People”) in southwest Texas, an amalgam of mostly Jumano, but also Comanche and Apachean groups (with close ties to Mescalero Apache and Lipan Apache) currently have 300 members with up to 3000 more claimed. They hope to be recognized as an official tribe.

Spanish records from the 16th to the 18th centuries frequently refer to the Jumano Indians, and the French noted them in areas to the east, as well. During the last decades of the 17th century, they were noted as traders and political leaders in the Southwest. Contemporary scholars are uncertain whether the Jumano were a single people organized into discrete bands, or whether the Spanish used Jumano as a generic term to refer to several different groups, as the references spanned peoples across a large geographic area.

Scholars have been unable to determine what language was spoken by the historic Jumano, although Uto-Aztecan, Tanoan, and Athabascan have been suggested. The Jumano have been identified in the historic record and by scholars as pottery-using farmers who lived at La Junta de los Rios, buffalo-hunting Plains Indians who frequently visited La Junta to trade, and/or both the farmers and the buffalo hunters.

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