Last Updated on September 16, 2011 by
Quahatika Indians. A small Piman tribe, closely allied to the Pima, of whom they are an offshoot and with whom they still intermarry to some extent. They live in the desert of south Arizona 50 miles south of the Gila river, speak a dialect slightly different from that of the Pima, and subsist by agriculture. They manufacture better pottery than that of their congeners, and are said to have introduced cattle among the Pima from the Mexicans about 1820. They formerly made arrows of yucca stalks which they bartered to their neighbors. It is said that about the beginning of the 18th century the Quahatika occupied with the Pima the village of Aquitun (Akuchini, ‘creek mouth’), west of Picacho, on the border of the sink of Santa Cruz river, but abandoned it about 1800. Their chief settlement is Quijotoa.