Lake Miwok

The Lake Miwok are a branch of the Miwok, a Native American people of Northern California. The Lake Miwok lived in the Clear Lake basin of what is now called Lake County. While they did not have an overarching name for themselves, the Lake Miwok word for people, Hotsa-ho, was suggested by A. L. Kroeber as a possible endonym, keeping with a common practice among tribal groups and the ethnographers studying them in the early 20th Century and with the term Miwok itself, which is the Central Sierra Miwok word for people.

The Lake Miwok spoke their own Lake language in the Utian linguistic group. They lived by hunting and gathering, and lived in small bands without centralized political authority. They were skilled at basketry.

The original Lake Miwok people world view included Shamanism, one form this took was the Kuksu religion that was evident in Central and Northern California, which included elaborate acting and dancing ceremonies in traditional costume, an annual mourning ceremony, puberty rites of passage, shamanic intervention with the spirit world and an all-male society that met in subterranean dance rooms. Kuksu was shared with other indigenous ethnic groups of Central California, such as their neighbors the Lake Pomo, also Maidu, Ohlone, Esselen, and northernmost Yokuts. However Kroeber observed less "specialized cosmogony" in the Miwok, which he termed one of the "southern Kuksu-dancing groups", in comparison to the Maidu and other northern California tribes.

Lake Miwok mythology and narratives were similar to other natives of Central and Northern California. The Lake Miwok believed in animal and human spirits, and saw the animal spirits as their ancestors. Coyote was seen as their ancestor and creator god.