The Yakama are a Native American tribe with nearly 10,851 members, based primarily in eastern Washington state.

Yakama people today are enrolled in the federally recognized tribe, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. Their Yakama Indian Reservation, along the Yakima River, covers an area of approximately 1.2 million acres (5,260 km²). Today the nation is governed by the Yakama Tribal Council, which consists of representatives of 14 tribes.

Their right to fish in their former territory is protected by treaties and was re-affirmed in late 20th-century court cases such as United States v. Washington (known as the Boldt Decision, 1974) and United States v. Oregon (Sohappy v. Smith, 1969), though more than a century of U.S. industrial pollution has contaminated these waterways with dangerous levels of toxic chemicals. The Columbia Basin Initiative aims to improve salmon-fishing for the tribe.

Scholars disagree on the origins of the name Yakama. The Sahaptin words, E-yak-ma, means "a growing family", and iyakima, means "pregnant ones". Other scholars note the word, yákama, which means "black bear," or ya-ki-ná, which means "runaway".

They have also been referred to as the Waptailnsim, "people of the narrow river," and Pa'kiut'lĕma, "people of the gap," which describes the tribe's location along the Yakima River. The Yakama identify as the Mamachatpam.

″Yakima″ or ″Yakama″ was first a collective term for five (originally six) regional bands who spoke the same language or dialect of Sahaptin, also known as Ichishkíin Sɨ́nwit (″this language″). Usually they named the individual bands, village groups, local groups, and rivers after a specific rock formation, their main camps, or after an important village or fishing site.

The English names of the following local rivers were derived from Sahaptin: the Klickitat, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Palouse, Yakima, Satus, Toppenish, Tieton, and Wenatchee (in each case the original native term referred not to the river itself, which generally was left unnamed):

Their lands lay within the Yakima Rivers (in Yakama: Tapteal – ″rapids″ because of the waterfalls at Prosser, Washington) watershed and for the most part east of the Cascade Range, to the south along the northern tributaries of the Columbia River (in Yakama: Nch'i-Wána – ″great river″) (here the Yakama bands frequently lived in bilingual villages together with Southern/Columbia River Sahaptin-speaking bands: Umatilla, Skin-pah/Skin, Tenino/Warm Springs), to the southwest along the Lower Snake River and Columbia River (here the Yakama bands lived also in bilingual villages together with Lower Snake River Sahaptin-speaking local groups of Chamnapam/Chem-na-pum, Wauyukma and Naxiyampam), to the northeast their tribal territories ranged up to the Wenatchee River (because of frequently intermarriages some of the originally Interior Salish-speaking Wenatchi bands switched to Sahaptin as first language), in the north to the lakes of Cle Elum Lake (after the Upper Yakama / Kittitas name Tie-el-Lum, meaning "swift water", referring to the Cle Elum River), Kachess Lake ("more fish") and Keechelus Lake ("few fish") at the headwaters of the Yakima River (with the directly northwest living Coast-Salish-speaking Snoqualmie the Yakama bands kept family ties), in the west across the Cascade Range to the headwaters of the Cowlitz River (shch'il), Lewis River ((wl'ɫt'kh) and White Salmon River (where there were also family ties with Coast-Salish-speaking Lower Cowlitz and Upper Chinookan/Kiksht-speaking Wasco-Wishram).