Ventura County Chumash use tomols to paddle back thousands of years
The boat is a time machine.
It's 28-feet-long and sits outside a Ventura art gallery. The flat-bottomed craft is being built from redwood planks on weekends by Native Americans and others. Chumash ancestors used the same wood for thousands of years to build these canoes called tomols.
Back then, the makers used pine-pitch glue called yop and lashed together the tomol's planks with a plant called dogbane. When the boat that sometimes stretched more than 30 feet was finished, the Chumash took it to rivers and the ocean. They filled it with sea bass and abalone. One boat could carry enough to feed 40 people.
Alan Salazar, Tataviam and Chumash storyteller, is helping build the kind of canoe called a tomol that was used by the Chumash for thousands of years.
Some 20,000 Chumash lived on California's southern and central coast before Spanish colonization. They paddled from mainland villages across the Santa Barbara Channel to Santa Cruz, San Miguel and Santa Rosa islands.
They used the tomols to carry coiled baskets and deer hides to the island. In return for the goods, they would be given the beads made of shells that were used as currency, said Alan Salazar, the Tataviam and Chumash elder who is helping lead the tomol project.
Men looking for mates visited the island because their home villages on the mainland were filled with relatives, Salazar said. They paddled out in a tomol for a few days, sometimes a few months.
“It was used like a small cargo ship and a water taxi,” Salazar said.
At a time when people are beginning to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday, the tomol represents a Chumash lifestyle that preceded the Declaration of Independence by 8,000 years, maybe more.
To Salazar, the boats offer a way to understand a culture before it was devastated during colonization that came about the same time as eastern colonies fought for and won their independence from Great Britain.
“We lost a whole way of life,” he said. “If this helps us bring people together than it’s much more important than just building canoes.”
From mupu to šišolop
The Chumash villages stretched from Malibu to Paso Robles. A community in Santa Paula was called mupu. Chumash lived in ta'apu in what is now Simi Valley. In Ventura, native people lived in different villages, including šišolop that reached to what is now Surfers Point.
“You’re sitting in a village right now,” said Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, a Chumash elder during an interview at a coffee house on Ventura's Main Street.
The communities had their own dialects and governments. On rare occasions, women served as chiefs.
People built round homes, or aps, out of willow, covering the branches with marsh plants called tule. Women wove baskets out of juncus plants. Men used bows to hunt deer and elk. Harpoons were flung from tomols to spear large fish for meals that also include soup made from acorns.
They gathered to celebrate the solstice at sites like Taylor Ranch outside of Ventura and at Mount Pinos above Ojai. They offered thanks for the harvest and for their lives.
It was mostly but not always peaceful. Relations between villages could be tense. Sometimes marriages between mainland and island communities were designed to in part to create political alliances.
The major causes of friction were wife-stealing and invading another village’s territory, said Jonathan Cordero, an ethnohistorian and scholar who has Chumash and Ramaytush Native American blood.
“If someone came into your tribal territory and shot a deer and took it away, they were basically taking food off of your plate,” he said.
'Our genocide'
Explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sailed to California in 1542. Spanish land expeditions and missionaries came more than two centuries later. The Europeans brought livestock, invasive plants and illnesses ranging from sexually transmitted diseases to measles.
Rivers became more polluted. The cattle and imported black mustard replaced native game and plants.
In the 1780s, Father Junipero Serra used the Chumash to build the last of his nine missions in Ventura. The Native Americans were urged to come to the missions, then told they couldn’t leave.
Tens of thousands Native Americans in California died from small pox and other diseases that feasted on the crowded missions. One-third of the children born in missions died before their first birthday, said Steven Hackel, a historian from UC Riverside. An estimated 3,000 indigenous people were buried in unmarked graves at Mission San Buenaventura.
Native Americans who tried to leave were flogged, Salazar said. They were told they were inferior. They were used as slave labor.
"It is our holocaust," Tumamait-Stenslie said. "It is our genocide."
Some things, like basket-making survived. Language, land, culture and the tomols were all but lost.
“I don’t think there was a corner of native life that was not touched,” Hackel said. “Native Americans felt like they could no longer freely express their religious beliefs and their cultures.”
The colonization was led by the Spanish and the missionaries. But across the United States, people who fought the British for independence chased out Native Americans.
“They became the people they fled,” said Tumamait-Stenslie, reflecting on the 250th anniversary of the country's birth. It's a happening she will largely ignore.
“There’s not anything for me to celebrate,” she said.
Hackel sees a link between the American revolution and the Chumash. He said America's fight and victory for independence may have fostered growing Native American resistance against the missions and Spanish colonization.
“You have native people who said, 'You know what. We want freedom from your missions. We want out of here,'” he said.
California became part of Mexico and the country's government transferred the missions away from the control of the Catholic church. The Chumash and other Native Americans were emancipated but very few of them were given back even part of their land. Instead, they worked as laborers on land that was once theirs.
Many sank into poverty. Their numbers dwindled. They were and are marginalized, said Cordero.
Many current tribes, including the Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians for Chumash in an area that covers Ventura County, are not federally recognized, meaning they don't get government funding.
"We are doing the best to rebuild our communities, to get people involved in language revitalization," Cordero said. "We need housing and jobs, and we need employment. We are continuing to face obstacles."
'No thank you'
Cordero, once a sociology professor at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, is chairman of the tribal council of the Ramaytush Tribe, believed to be the first people who lived on the San Francisco Peninsula. The tribe has been asked to participate in events commemorating the 1776 expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza to California and then San Francisco.
“We graciously say, ‘No thank you’,” he said. “They are asking our participation in a historical event that was the beginning of the end of native people in California.”
Salazar’s father was a Marine who fought in Okinawa and Saipan during World War II. Salazar feels proud of America. He also mourns the devastation of his culture and his way of life.
He sees the tomols as a way to help his own people and others understand and celebrate heritage.
"We don’t have a reservation or a tribal hall. It’s much more difficult for us to learn our traditions, let alone our language and our songs," he said.
The volunteers building tomols work every Saturday at the Vita Art Center in Ventura and have for nearly a year. Some are Native American. Others are archaeologists and construction workers.
Tomols have been built elsewhere. But the boats being built in Ventura are the first in the county in nearly 200 years.
"Everything we do in our culture is to honor the ancestors, those who came before us, those were prosecuted for practicing our language, for practicing our ceremonies," said Raudel Banuelos, Chumash cultural adviser at CSU Channel Islands. "Our tomol culture has been dormant for a long time. It's a rebirth."
The first of three tomols will be finished later this year. It will be used by the Barbareño/Ventureño tribe. Paddlers will gather at beaches to practice and for excursions that will eventually lead to the ultimate goal — a journey across the channel to Santa Cruz Island.
A second tomol will be used by Salazar’s tribe, the Fernadeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians. A third will be used by Chumash and Tataviam women paddlers.
The boats and the journeys bring history into the present and future, just like language, songs and basket-making, Salazar said.
“All those traditional skills, they unite us,” he said.
Tom Kisken covers health care and other news for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at [email protected].
