Mount Umunhum is a sacred site for today's Amah Mustun and Muwekma tribal bands, the living descendants of the ancestral Ohlone tribes native to the region. Since the region's earliest written records, the mountain has been called Umunhum, the root word for hummingbird in five different Ohlone languages, including the Mutsun dialect of the Monterey Bay and southern Santa Clara Valley areas, and the spoken word sounds like the noise a hummingbird makes while hovering. In the beliefs of the Amah Mutsun and many other Ohlone people, Creator gave humans higher intelligence and an obligation to solve problems and care for all living things, decisions are to be made only if they will be for the good of the next seven generations, and true wealth is the ability to carry indigenous knowledge forward to provide for all people, animals, plants, Mother Earth, wind, water, and shadows. In the Amah Mutsun creation story, when the world was covered with water, Eagle gave Hawk a feather to strengthen him for a dive to the bottom of the ocean, where Hawk brought up the seafloor so clay could be shaped into finned, winged, and four-legged animals, and Eagle directed Hummingbird to retrieve fire from the Badger People, after which Hummingbird brought fire to the world and returned it to the top of Mount Umunhum, where it ignited in Hummingbird's throat and turned it red. In a Monterey Bay story of beginnings told at Mission Santa Cruz, when the world was finished and then flooded, Eagle, Hummingbird, and Coyote stood on a high mountain in Monterey County until Eagle carried the others to a still higher mountain, and after the waters went down Coyote found a beautiful girl, married her, and their children spread out over the world and became the forefathers of the different tribes.
