The Tübatulabal are an indigenous people of Kern River Valley in the Sierra Nevada range of California. They may have been the first people to make this area their permanent home. Today many of them are enrolled in the Tule River Indian Tribe. They are descendants of the people of the Uto-Aztecan language group, separating from Shoshone people about 3000 years ago. Territory The Tübatulabal's traditional homelands extended over including the Kern and South Fork Kern Rivers drainages (located in the Kern Valley area of California) extending from very high mountainous terrain in the north to about below the junction of the two rivers in the south. The high mountains in the north () are interspersed with lakes and meadows. The southern area () has three connected valleys: Kern Valley, South Fork Kern Valley, and Hot Springs Valley, where summers are hot and winters cold and rainy. The valleys are grasslands and chaparral with cacti, scrub oaks, willows, elderberry, and cottonwoods as primary vegetation with some joshua trees, junipers, piñons, oaks, and sugar pines. Name The valley of the Kern River has been the home of three distinct bands which are collectively named Tübatulabal. The name Tübatulabal (“a people that go to the forest to gather tubat (piñon nuts)”) loosely translates as "pine-nut eaters." The name was given to the tribe by the neighboring Yokuts. At one point in history the Yokuts also called the Tübatulabals, "Pitanisha" (place where the rivers fork). The name for the north fork of the river has the Indian name of, Palegewanap or "place of the big river." The south fork of the river conversely was given the name of Kutchibichwanap Palap, or "place of the little river." Bands The three bands that comprise the Tübatulabal tribe are (from west to east): Bankalachi, Pong-ah-lache or Toloim / Tulamni (lived in the Greenhorn Mountains and from Poso Creek and Poso Flats around Glennville, California north along Cedar Creek, White River to Deer Creek, sometimes they were farther up along the South Fork Tule River, territory of the Tule River Yokuts, with the Foothill Yokuts (Tule River and Poso Creek Yokuts) they practiced extensive exogamy marriages, so that they are described as an intermediate group) Bankalachi or Bokninuwiad (northern group, oft considered Foothill Yokuts) Kumachisi (southern group, oft considered Foothill Yokuts) Toloim or Tulamni (southwestern group, oft identified with the Tulamni Band of Buena Vista Yokuts) Pahkanapil,