Final report - Cultural affiliation and lineal descent of Chumash peoples in the Channel Islands and the Santa Monica Mountains

McLendon, Sally; Johnson, John

This report contains information, cultural affiliation, and lineal descent about the identifiable groups of the Channel Islands and the Santa Monica Mountains. This ethnohistoric study was designed to assist two National Parks in California, Channel Islands National Park and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, in complying with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA), and strengthening their existing consultative and interpretive service. In California the accurate determination of the key concepts discussed above is complicated by several factors: (1) the exact nature of the earlier identifiable groups often has been obscured by twentieth-century anthropological simplification and generalization that lumped them together on the basis of language alone; (2) many of the earlier identifiable groups have never been federally acknowledged or have lost their federal acknowledgement despite their continued existence; and (3) Indian identity is an increasingly popular attribute to claim in California. Channel Islands National Park and Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area have stewardship over territories once held by people speaking Chumash languages. Citizens of the earlier original groups in these areas were incorporated into six Spanish missions established between 1772 and 1804. Our study takes advantage of the rich source of information, available in mission registers that record the names of all the people from the earlier identifiable groups as they were incorporated into these missions, and their subsequent marriages, children, and deaths. This information when combined with censuses taken after the annexation of California to the United States in 1850, ethnographic and linguistic fieldnotes of H.W. Henshaw, and the voluminous oral histories and ethnographic notes collected by the anthropologist J.P. Harrington from 1913 to 1961 establishes an extraordinarily detailed and rich data base for establishing the earlier identifiable groups in the Channel Islands and the Santa Monica Mountains and tracing cultural affiliation and lineal descent. This is the first extensive study to test the value of mission records; other census data; and linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric fieldwork in addressing these three key NAGPRA concepts.

Final report - Cultural affiliation and lineal descent of Chumash peoples in the Channel Islands and the Santa Monica Mountains

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