YAKWAL INDIANS. The Yakwal (Tonkawa for "drifted ones") Indians are known only from Tonkawa folklore. According to a legend collected by A. S. Gatschet, part of the Tonkawa Indians were once isolated by land submergence on the Texas coast. Many years later the main body of Tonkawas found these people living near present Galveston and called them Yakwals. It is not known how much historical truth remains in this traditional record. A. F. Sjoberg has suggested that Yakwal may refer to the Mayeye Indians, a Tonkawan group that joined the Karankawas near the coast in the late eighteenth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frederick Webb Hodge, ed., Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (2 vols., Washington: GPO, 1907, 1910; rpt., New York: Pageant, 1959). A. F. Sjoberg, "The Culture of the Tonkawa, A Texas Indian," Texas Journal of Science 5 (September 1953).
