For thousands of years, members of
California’s Wintun Tribes have been guided
by a culture rich with an understanding of
medicine, technology, food production and
land stewardship. The towns and roads of
today were the villages and trade routes of
our past. Our land was healthy and our early communities thrived.
The 1800s
The arrival of missionaries and European explorers forever altered the course of Native people in California. Many Wintun people were enslaved to serve the missions, while violence and disease further decreased our numbers. In the 1800s, many of our ancestors were forced from their home and hunting lands by opportunists driven by gold and greed. Northern California Native people were decimated by the Gold Rush and federal policies that legalized genocide. During this time, the Yocha Dehe population declined dramatically and our Tribe was rendered nearly extinct.
The early 1900s
In the early 1900s, our Tribe was forcibly removed from our villages by the federal government and placed on a federally created rancheria (the legal term for small reservations in California) in Rumsey. Stranded on barren, nonarable land, we struggled to survive. In 1940, our people gained a hard-won relocation to a small parcel of land further south in the Capay Valley, where we managed to cultivate small amounts of food. Without the opportunity to produce more than subsistence levels of crops, our ancestors, who had lived sustainably for thousands of years, became dependent on the federal government for survival.
The Late 1900s to Today
In the 1980s some of our ancestral lands were restored, providing a base for housing and economic development. It was at this time that the State of California instituted the California Lottery and the federal government enacted the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which created a means to promote economic development and self-sufficiency with the explicit purpose of strengthening tribal self-governance. This provided our Tribe the opportunity to open Cache Creek Indian Bingo on a portion of our 188 acres of trust land.
Initially, our Tribe knew little about gaming. We focused our resources on building the necessary foundation for our tribal government to manage assets generated by the bingo hall.
Powered by hard work and determination, we developed our own management strategy and expanded the bingo hall into the world-class Cache Creek Casino Resort, which now provides economic stability and opportunity for our Tribal Citizens.
The independence gained from gaming revenue gave the Tribe the wherewithal to reacquire more of our traditional lands, to invest in the future of our children through improved education, and to provide philanthropic support for communities in need. In 2009, we legally changed our name from the Rumsey Band of Wintun Indians—as we were originally labeled by the federal government, for the Rumsey Indian Rancheria on which our people were initially settled—to the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, to honor the name of our homeland in our Patwin language. This name change represents an important mark in time for the Citizens of Yocha Dehe: it connects our Tribe to our heritage and expresses our sense of pride and hope for the future.