Big Bear Valley sits at seven thousand feet in open pine, and the people who lived there called themselves Yuhaaviatam — People of the Pines. They were one clan among the Maara'yam, the People of Maara', whom the first Spanish arrivals filed under a single word: Serrano, highlanders. Maara'yam country was large. It ran from the Antelope Valley on the west across the southwestern Mojave, down through the San Gabriel and San Bernardino ranges, and out onto the valley floor. They summered in the mountains and wintered on the flat, on ground that is now San Bernardino, Highland and Redlands.
In 1866 a militia raised in San Bernardino spent thirty-two days killing them. Fewer than thirty of the clan came off the mountain alive.
What came up the passes
The missions reached them from the coast. From 1771 onward Maara'yam people were taken from the Antelope Valley, the Mojave River and the inland valleys to Mission San Gabriel, and the nation's own account of that century is blunt: thousands killed or forced into servitude. The Spanish built inland outposts to work the water and the land, and Maara'yam hands built them. The 1819 asistencia at Redlands went up that way, and so did the Mill Creek Zanja, the irrigation ditch that still carries water across the east end of this valley more than two centuries later.
The missions were secularized in the 1830s. Mexico lost the territory in 1848. American settlers arrived in a country with no authority left in it that had any interest in slowing them down, and in 1860 gold turned up in Holcomb Valley, immediately north of Big Bear. Miners and loggers went up behind it. Across Maara'yam territory, clan after clan was killed or pushed off its village sites.
Thirty-two days
In 1866 three men were killed at Las Flores Ranch in Summit Valley, and buildings were burned and looted at what is now Lake Arrowhead. The raiders were almost certainly not Maara'yam. The city of San Bernardino's own published account of it says they were most likely Paiute or Chemehuevi.
It made no difference. The valley's men formed militia units with the sanction of the State of California and went up into the mountains to empty them. The campaign ran thirty-two days across the Big Bear country, and the Yuhaaviatam call what happened a massacre, which is the correct word for it. Most of the clan was killed. Twenty to thirty people survived.
Their kiika', their leader, had been born in 1814 in his father's village in these mountains and named Paakuma. Outside the clan he was known by a Spanish name, Santos Manuel. He took the survivors down off the mountain.
The valley floor
They came down to Warm Creek, a tributary of the Santa Ana on the San Bernardino flat, and later moved to Harlem Springs, near what is now Victoria and Base Line in Highland. They held title to none of it.
Title came in 1891, when Congress passed the Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians and a reservation was set aside — 657 acres of dry foothill, named for Paakuma. The government named the people as well: San Manuel Band of Mission Indians. Neither half of that was theirs. The land was, in the nation's own description of it, restricted, isolated and unproductive, and it looked down on the best agricultural ground in the state, because those were exactly the decades when the floor of this valley filled up with navel oranges, packing houses and money.
The same government opened Sherman Institute down the valley in Riverside in 1902 and filled it with Native children taken from nations across the West. Paakuma lived until 1919.
Yaamava'
The nation put its own language in front of the public in 2021, when it renamed its casino Yaamava' — the Maara'yam word for the spring season.
Then, on April 16, 2025, having adopted a new constitution, it announced that it was finished with the name the government had issued in 1891. It is the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation now. Chairwoman Lynn Valbuena put it as a matter of identity rather than labeling: the name is a connection to who the people are, where they come from and what they keep. The reservation has grown from 657 acres to more than 1,100 north of Highland, and the nation now employs over seven thousand people across the Inland Empire.
The billboard
To tell people the name had changed, the nation bought a billboard on Interstate 10 near Yucaipa, half a mile past County Line Road, on the corridor everyone in this valley drives.
On the morning of Wednesday, November 26, 2025, the day before Thanksgiving, someone covered it. An American flag went over the left of the board, and beside it, in stenciled yellow capitals close to two feet tall, ran the sentence "America is not on stolen land. Your ancestors were conquered. Happy Thanksgiving." The last three words were smaller and freehand, added by someone who had run out of stencil or patience.
It was gone by half past one that afternoon. Yucaipa's city government called it a criminal act and asked the public for tips. The nation replied that it was disappointed, that it had lived here since time immemorial and had always tried to exist alongside the country that arrived, and that it would rather talk with its neighbors about the history they share.
What the flag and the lettering left showing was the right-hand end of the board: the last syllable of the name, tam, and the nation's own mark beside it.