Winnemem Wintu Tribe

The Winnemem Wintu ("middle river people" or "middle water people") are a band of the Native American Wintu tribe originally located along the lower McCloud River, above Shasta Dam near Redding, California. The Winnemem are one of what anthropologists have hypothesized to be nine total bands of Wintu. They are not a federally recognized tribe, although they are working toward federal recognition. Some Winnemem Wintu feel that it is by government error rather than termination that the Bureau of Indian Affairs does not recognize them. And some Wintu representatives, of Winnemem heritage, have been informed by Interior Officials that it was "Bureaucratic Oversight" that resulted in the entire Wintu being omitted from the list of federally recognized tribes as early as the 1940s.