Yurok people

The Yurok people are an Algic-speaking Indigenous people of California that has existed along the or "Health-kick-wer-roy" (now known as the Klamath River) and on the Pacific coast, from Trinidad south of the Klamath's mouth almost to Crescent City along the north coast.

The people of the Yurok Tribe traditionally identify as , a Yurok word simply meaning "the people." Some historic documents, like the Yurok Tribe's unratified treaty with the Government of the United States (GoUS), refer to the Yurok Tribe as the Lower Klamath, Pulikla, or Poh-lik Indians to distinguish the people of the Yurok Tribe from the "Upper Klamath" or "Peh-tsick" Indians, who are now known as the Karuk Tribe. The name Yurok is derived from the Karuk word , meaning "downriver people; i.e. Yurok Indians". American ethnologist George Gibbs first recorded the term as 'Yourrk' while traveling with Col. Redick McKee in 1851, and mistakenly used it as the name of the tribe in his book, Observations on the Indians of the Klamath River and Humboldt Bay, Accompanying Vocabularies of Their Languages, published in 1887. These names all developed from the way the river was, and still is, centered in the worldview of the people of the Yurok Tribe. Traditionally, the people of the Yurok Tribe would refer to villages down river as (meaning 'Down River Indian'), villages upriver as (meaning 'Up River Indian'), and villages on the Pacific coast as (meaning "Coast Indian"). However, all these terms were merely practical descriptions of how to get to or from a village location within the Ancestral Land of the Yurok Tribe; the , and were, and are, all still .