Chumash people

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Rafael Solares, a Samala chief. Captain of Soxtonoxmu capital village in the Santa Ynez Valley. Photograph taken by Leon de Cessac in the late 19th century.
Rafael Solares, a Samala chief. Captain of Soxtonoxmu capital village in the Santa Ynez Valley. Photograph taken by Leon de Cessac in the late 19th century.
Pre-contact distribution of the Chumash
Pre-contact distribution of the Chumash

The Chumash are Native American people who historically inhabit chiefly central and southern coastal regions of California, in portions of what is now San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, extending from Morro Bay in the north to Malibu in the south. They also occupied three of the Channel Islands: Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and San Miguel; the smaller island of Anacapa was uninhabited. Modern place names with Chumash origins include Malibu, Lompoc, Ojai, Point Mugu, Piru, Lake Castaic, and Simi Valley.

Archaeological research demonstrates that the Chumash have deep roots in the Santa Barbara Channel area and lived along the southern California Coast for millennia.

Contents

[edit] Population

Further information: Population of Native California

Estimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. Alfred L. Kroeber [1] thought that the 1770 population of the Chumash might have been about 10,000. Alan K. Brown concluded that the population was not over 15,000. Sherburne F. Cook [2] at various times estimated the aboriginal Chumash as 8,000, 13,650, 20,400, and 18,500.

Some scholars (Erlandson et al. 2001) have suggested that Chumash population may have declined substantially during a "protohistoric" period (AD 1542-1769) when intermittent contacts with the crews of Spanish ships--including those of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's expedition who wintered in the Santa Barbara Channel in AD 1542-43--but the Chumash appear to have been thriving in the late 18th century when Spaniards first began actively colonizing the California coast. With the construction of several Spanish missions at Ventura, Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Santa Inez, and San Luis Obispo, the Chumash were devastated by Old World diseases such as influenza and small pox, which they no immunological resistance to. By 1900, their numbers had declined to just 200. According to some reports, there are now some 5,000 Chumash peoples.[3]

[edit] Culture

The Chumash were hunter-gatherers and were adept at fishing. They are one of the relatively few New World peoples who regularly navigated the ocean (another was the Tongva, a neighboring tribe located to the south). Some settlements built plank boats called tomols, which facilitated the distribution of goods and could even be used for whaling. Remains of a developed Chumash culture, including rock paintings apparently depicting the Chumash cosmology, can still be seen.

Anthropologists eagerly sought Chumash baskets as prime examples of the craft, and two of the finest collections are at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris, France. The Museum of Natural History at Santa Barbara is believed to have the largest collection of Chumash baskets.

Several related Chumashan languages were spoken. There are no longer any living native speakers, although they are well documented in the unpublished fieldnotes of linguist John Peabody Harrington. Especially well documented are the Barbareño, Ineseño, and Ventureño dialects. Several Chumash families are working to revitalize the language.

The Chumash of the Northern Channel Islands were at the center of an intense regional trade network. Beads made from olivella shells were manufactured on the Channel Islands and used as a form of currency by the Chumash.[4] These shell beads were traded to neighboring groups and have been found throughout alta California. Over the course of late prehistory, millions of shell beads were manufactured and traded from Santa Cruz Island. It has been suggested that exclusive control over stone quarries used to manufacture the drills needed in bead production may have played a role in the development of social complexity in Chumash society.[5]

Some researchers believe the Chumash may have been visited by Polynesians between AD 400 and 800, nearly 1,000 years before Christopher Columbus reached North America. [6] Although the concept is still rejected by most archaeologists who work with the Chumash culture, studies published in peer-reviewed journals have given the idea greater plausibility.[7] The Chumash advanced sewn-plank canoe design, which is used throughout the Polynesian Islands but is unknown in North America except by those two tribes, is cited as the chief evidence for contact. Comparative linguistics also may provide evidence as the Chumash word for "sewn-plank canoe," tomolo'o, may have been derived from kumulā'au, the Polynesian word for the redwood logs used in that construction. However, the language comparison is generally considered tentative. Furthermore, the development of the Chumash plank canoe is fairly well represented in the archaeological record and spans a time period of several centuries.[8][9] This evidence strongly suggests that the Tomol was an indigenous invention.

[edit] Modern times

The first modern Tomol was built and launched in 1976 as a result of a joint venture between Quabajai Chumash descendants of The Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The tomol was named Helek, the Chumash word for Falcon. The descendants reformed the Brotherhood of the Tomol, paddled around the Santa Barbara Channel Islands on a ten day journey, stopping on each island. The second tomol, the Elye'wun ("swordfish"), was launched in 1997. On September 9, 2001 by the Chumash Maritime Association, several Chumash bands and descendants came together to paddle from the mainland to Santa Cruz Island in the Elye'wun.

The Santa Ynez Band of Chumash run a casino on their reservation in Santa Ynez, California.

In addition to the Santa Ynez Band, there is also the Chumash Coastal Band, the second bast of Chumash Indians. They are currently trying to gain federal recognition.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kroeber, p.883
  2. ^ Cook, 1976
  3. ^ Native Inhabitants
  4. ^ Arnold, Jeanne E. 2001 The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom: The Chumash of the Channel Islands. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
  5. ^ Arnold, Jeanne E. 2001 The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chiefdom: The Chumash of the Channel Islands. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
  6. ^ Did ancient Polynesians visit California? Maybe so., San Francisco Chronicle
  7. ^ For articles on the Polynesian contact theory, see Jones, Terry L.; Kathryn A. Klar (June 3, 2005). "Diffusionism Reconsidered: Linguistic and Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Polynesian Contact with Southern California". American Antiquity 70: 457-484. , and Adams, James D.; Cecilia Garcia and Eric J. Lien (January 23, 2008). "A Comparison of Chinese and American Indian (Chumash) Medicine". Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. . See also Terry Jones's homepage, California Polytechnic State University.
  8. ^ Arnold, Jeanne E. 1995 Transportation Innovation and Social Complexity among Maritime Hunter- Gatherer Societies. American Anthropologist 97:733-747.
  9. ^ Gamble, Lynn H 2002 Archaeological Evidence for the Origin of the Plank Canoe in North America. In American Antiquity. 67(2) 301-315

[edit] References

  • Anderson, Atholl. 2006. "Polynesian Seafaring and American Horizons: A Response to Jones and Klar". American Antiquity 71:759-763.
  • Applegate, Richard. 1972. Ineseño Chumash Grammar and Dictionary. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
  • Brown, Alan K. 1967. "The Aboriginal Population of the Santa Barbara Channel". University of California Archaeological Survey Reports 69:1-99.
  • Cook, Sherburne F. 1976. The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization. University of California Press, Berkeley.
  • Cook, Sherburne F. 1976. The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970. University of California Press, Berkeley.
  • Erlandson, Jon M., Torben C. Rick, Douglas J. Kennett, and Philip L. Walker. 2001. Dates, demography, and disease: Cultural contacts and possible evidence for Old World epidemics among the Island Chumash. Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly 37(3):11-26.
  • Gibson, Robert O. The Chumash (Indians of North America) Chelsea House Publications, 1990, ISBN: 1555467008.
  • Jones, Terry L., and Kathryn A. Klar. 2005. "Diffusionism Reconsidered: Linguistic and Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Polynesian Contact with Southern California". American Antiquity 70:457-484.
  • Jones, Terry L., and Kathryn A. Klar. 2006. "On Open Minds and Missed Marks: A Response to Atholl Anderson". American Antiquity 71:765-770.
  • Klar, Kathryn A., and Terry L. Jones. 2005. "Linguistic Evidence for a Prehistoric Polynesia-Southern California Contact Event". Anthropological Linguistics 47:369-400.
  • Kroeber, A. L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 78. Washington, D.C.

[edit] External links