I recently had the good fortune to get a preview tour of the new Chumash museum, which opens to the public May 15. It is, in a word, spectacular. The museum challenges and will transform the way that history and culture are understood and represented in Santa Barbara County.
The museum is truly stunning, both inside and out. Native plants flank stone pathways interspersed with ceramic tiles describing important moments in the tribe’s history. Dominating the several acres of museum parkland, is a large domed structure, inspired by the traditional Chumash dwelling. Inside the museum, the displays are equally original and evocative, with vividly rendered paintings of ancient ritual dances and artful displays of intricate woven baskets and other cultural artifacts.
But the museum goes beyond the traditional portrayal of the Chumash, presenting a more dynamic view of the tribe’s history. We see how colonization led to culture loss and to economic and political marginalization over the last two centuries. Videotaped testimonies of current Elders recount the difficult circumstances of life in the 20th century. How many of their young were forcibly shipped off to Indian boarding schools, and how the reservation lacked electricity, potable water, and sewage until the 1970s.
Those tough times are counterbalanced by a moving display honoring Maria Solares, a “grandmother” and hero to the tribe. Maria, who was groomed to be a culture bearer, was fluent in Samala, the variation of Chumash spoken in the Santa Ynez Valley. Through a series of fortuitous events — her work with the anthropologist J.P. Harrington in the early 20th century, and the recovery of that work in the late 1960s when a linguistics student, Richard Applegate, found the thousands of pages of Harrigton’s interviews with Maria — the tribe has been able to revitalize its language, songs, dances, and ritual.
These displays and the museum in general are the culmination of a long, concerted effort by many people, including Museum Board Chair Kathleen Marshall and Cultural Programs Director Nakia Zavalla, both state-certified Samala language teachers. Major kudos also to Museum Director James Bier and Museum Operations Manager Nick Gianis, who worked with the chair and other traditionalists to push past obstacles, bringing this ambitious project to an incredibly successful completion.
But I am biased. Working as a counselor in their children’s summer program in the early 2000s, I have seen the progress the tribe has made in reclaiming their cultural heritage. Marshall, Zavalla, and other traditionalists worked tirelessly to bring back songs, dances, and rituals, compiling a Samal/English dictionary, and pushing forward with the dream of a museum. As Marshall told me almost 20 years ago, “Having a Chumash cultural center will be huge, a great place to educate the people that don’t really understand.”
Some powerful Santa Ynez Valley residents and a local newspaper, now defunct, had launched an attack against the tribe and the museum claiming it would just be a place for more slot machines. “We all honor the artifacts our ancestors made, doing songs and prayers as we bring these back into our lives,” Marshall said. “We’d never dishonor or disrespect them by putting a slot machine in our museum.”
Assembling all these artifacts has been challenging. Over the last decades, as the tribe has gained more cultural power, it has successfully repatriated artifacts held by museums and universities. But as Marshall highlights, the tribe hopes to also reclaim artifacts from private collectors. “Families that have been in this valley for generations have collected our artifacts, and I hope they’d come forward and give those things back. For us, whether they’re in a museum or with a private collector, those artifacts are a piece of us.”
Repatriating their cultural patrimony, revitalizing culture and language, and building on the knowledge of the ancestors, the beautiful new Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center is a monument to the tribe’s growing cultural power.and its perseverance in the face of adversity.
Paul H. Gelles, formerly a professor of Anthropology at U.C. Riverside and a teacher at Midland School, is the author of “Chumash Renaissance: Indian Casinos, Education, and Cultural Politics in Rural California,” published in 2013.
