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Suma-Jumano


The Suma People (also Zuma and Zumana) lived in northern Chihuahua and the Rio Grande valley of western Texas. They were nomadic hunter gatherers who practiced little or no agriculture. The Suma are extinct as a distinct people, Their descendants are the Mestizo Population of much of Northern Chihuahua as well as some Apaches who can trace their ancestry to Sumas that assimilated into the Apache people.

Confusion is rife concerning the complex mix of indigenous peoples who lived near the Rio Grande in west Texas. They are often collectively called Jumanos, a name which probably should only be applied to the Plains Indians who lived in the Pecos River and Concho River valleys of Texas but traveled to and traded with the people in the Rio Grande Valley. Near La Junta de los Rios, the junction of the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos, were a large number of farming villages whose inhabitants were given more than a dozen names by the Spanish. It is unclear whether the La Junta Indians belonged to a single ethnic group and spoke the same language or were instead a mixture of languages and peoples. Also unclear is whether they were related to the more nomadic Jumano.

Upstream on the Rio Grande from La Junta were the people who came to be called the Suma, and further upstream from El Paso northward were the Manso Indians. The Manso and the Suma appear to have had similar cultures, although it is uncertain whether they spoke the same or similar languages. One theory is that the Indians of the El Paso and La Junta regions were intermixed when the Spanish arrived and that the Spaniards separated them into groups for "ease of government and increased control." The opposite is also proposed: that the Manso, Suma, Jumano, and La Junta Indians may have become mixed together in reaction to the threat from the Spanish and their diminishing population due to slave raids and European introduced diseases.


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