The Chumash Indian Museum, in Thousands Oaks, California, (a 30-minute drive from Ventura Harbor), offers further background on the region’s Chumash history, with replicas of traditional villages and an ethnobotany garden. “ walking through the doorway of your home that happened to be the jaw of a great blue whale,” she says. When she visits, she often thinks of her forebears’ resourcefulness, how they used seagrass, willows, and animal parts to construct dome huts to protect themselves from the elements. Tumamait-Stenslie suggests viewing the island like a natural history museum to understand the Chumash’s (and their ancestors’) relationship with the landscape. ( Is California’s Condor Trail the next great thru-hike?) Each element symbolizes Chumash ecological knowledge and reliance. Right: Tumamait-Stenslie made this necklace from abalone shell fragments, manzanita berries, and acorns. “We have the Rainbow Bridge story, in which we were created on Santa Cruz Island and crossed over to the mainland.” These tales center around the Earth god, Hutash, who made people from the seeds of the Magic Plant, and her husband, Alchupo’osh , the Sky Snake, also known as the Milky Way.

She says going to the islands is like returning home.Īt Channel Islands National Park, Tumamait-Stenslie educates campers about Chumash culture around campfires during the summer (contact the visitors center for a schedule).

“We are a diverse group of people with seven separate languages,” says Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, former tribal chair of the Barbeño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians, whose family tree branches out to Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa islands, Malibu, and Carpinteria.

Many other bands are seeking federal recognition. These days, there are 14 bands of Chumash Indians including the federally recognized Santa Ynez Band. Their territory stretched 7,000 square miles from the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley to Paso Robles and Malibu and out to four of the five northern Channel Islands: Tuqan (San Miguel Island), Wi’ma (Santa Rosa Island), Limuw (Santa Cruz), and Anyapakh (Anacapa Island.) By the 1810s the Chumash who didn’t perish from introduced European epidemics, such as measles, were forcibly removed from the islands and placed in Spanish missions. Here’s why you should go.īefore the arrival of Gaspar de Portola’s land expedition in 1769, the Chumash population in California was estimated at around 22,000. Astronomers and storytellers, their connection to the environment can be seen today in pictographs at places like Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park near Santa Barbara.Ī trip to Santa Rosa Island-where unique flora and fauna are threaded by hiking trails-offers a vivid understanding of not only the region’s deep Chumash history and culture, but North American history. The relatives of the modern-day Chumash weren’t just skilled boat makers, they were expert basket weavers and fishers who built thriving villages throughout the region, overseen by both male and female leaders in a matrilineal society. “We now have a greater appreciation for the diversity of lifestyles 13,000 years ago-they weren’t all Clovis hunters,” Johnson adds, referencing early people who migrated via the Bering Land Bridge and hunted mammoths. The Arlington Springs Man, as the bones were called, supports the theory of a coastal migration by the earliest people from Northeast Asia into the Americas. Johnson, Orr’s successor at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, determined that the bones were more than 13,000 years old-making them the oldest-known human remains in North America. During his many expeditions, he excavated entire Chumash villages, numerous graves, middens (or archaeological waste pile), as well as the large bones of pygmy mammoths, which roamed the island 10,000 years ago.īut nearly 40 years after his 1959 discovery, John R. Orr conducted fieldwork on windswept Santa Rosa for more than two decades. While digging in the island’s Arlington Canyon in 1959, archaeologist Phillip Orr discovered two femora that he suspected dated back to the late Pleistocene and brought them back to the mainland. Archaeological intrigue lingers on this arid isle, the second largest in California’s Channel Islands National Park. Ringed by aquamarine waters, Santa Rosa Island is a folded landscape of canyons, mountains, and hanging sea cliffs.

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