Chumash Indians

The Chumash Indians are an Indian group that inhabited an extensive south-central California territory that stretched from the southern Salinas Valley in the north to the Santa Monica Mountains in the south. The Chumash territory also included the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. They numbered an estimated 18,500 when the Spaniards came to Alta California in 1769.

The Chumash had a sophisticated matrilineal tribal government and were, at the time of Spanish arrival, in the process of a social evolution that was leading to social differentiation. They practiced food-resource management and utilized a variety of food sources from the diverse ecologies found within their territory. They used burning to maximize seed production and selectively promoted the growth of certain grasses that produced more seeds. Fish, marine mammals, and shellfish were also exploited. The Chumash are renowned for the sophisticated construction of seaworthy plank canoes, called tomols, as well as cave paintings and money made of shells.

The Franciscan missionaries established five missions in Chumash territory: San Luis Obispo (1772), San Buenaventura (1782), Santa Barbara (1786), La Purísima (1787), and Santa Ynez (1804). During the course of some fifty years, the Franciscans resettled the bulk of the Chumash in these five missions, where life proved unhealthy for them because of disease, the stress of cultural change, and crowded living conditions. The rate of population decline reached about 85 percent from contact population levels, so that by 1832, there were only 2,259 Chumash converts living in the five missions. Infant mortality was particularly high—about two-thirds of all children died before reaching age five, and only one-fourth reached puberty. A small number of Chumash survive today in the Santa Barbara-San Luis Obispo county areas and preserve much of their culture.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, only one of the existing fourteen bands of Chumash in California is a federally recognized tribe, the Samala or Santa Ynez Chumash. In 2002 Californians voted to give exclusive rights of a Las Vegas-style casino operation to Native Americans. Feuding within the Chumash tribe over blood quantum (one must be able to document one-quarter tribal blood to be an enrolled member) has increased since the opening of the Chumash Casino Resort because enrolled members (approximately 200) generally receive $30,000 per month from casino profits.

See alsoCalifornia; Indigenous Peoples; Missions: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arnold, Jeanne E., ed. The Origins of a Pacific Coast Chief-dom: The Chumash of the Channel Islands. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001.

Johnson, John R. "The Chumash and the Missions" in David H. Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences, vol. 1, Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (1989), pp. 365-375.

Kroeber, Alfred L. Handbook of California Indians (1925, repr. 1976).

                                      Robert H. Jackson