The
Pomo people are an
indigenous people of California. The historic Pomo territory in northern California was large, bordered by the
Pacific Coast to the west, extending inland to
Clear Lake, and mainly between
Cleone and
Duncans Point. One small group, the Northeastern Pomo of the
Stonyford vicinity of
Colusa County, was separated from the core Pomo area by lands inhabited by
Yuki and
Wintuan speakers. The name
Pomo derives from a conflation of the Pomo words and . It originally meant "those who live at red earth hole" and was once the name of a village in southern
Potter Valley near the present-day community of
Pomo. It may have referred to local deposits of the red mineral
magnesite, used for red beads, or to the reddish earth and clay, such as
hematite, mined in the area. In the Northern Pomo dialect,
-pomo or
-poma was used as a suffix after the names of places, to mean a subgroup of people of the place. By the year 1877 (possibly beginning with Powers), the use of Pomo had been extended in English to mean the entire people known today as the Pomo.