A Chumash Chapter

The Chumash

by JOHN M. FOSTER photos submitted by

THE OJAI VALLEY MUSEUM

in the Ojai Valley

As I walk the Foothill Trails above Ojai and then down into the city streets, I am in two worlds, one with fl owing streams, thick groves of oaks, occasional bear footprints, and the scent of sage, the other fi lled with pavement, tourists, traffi c signals, honking cars, and the smell of barbeque.

I SEE THE WORLD AROUND US TODAY AND THE WORLD AROUND US THAT DATES AT LEAST AS FAR BACK AS 13,000 YEARS AGO WHEN THE CHUMASH FLOURISHED AND PROSPERED, UNTIL THE SPANISH ARRIVED AND THE TWO WORLDS COLLIDED.

When Europeans fi rst arrived, Chumash-speaking peoples occupied a large area that extended south along the California coast from San Luis Obispo County into Los Angeles County and east to Kern County, and included the Channel Islands of San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa. The Chumash living in Ojai spoke Ventureño, one of the six major dialects of the Chumash language. Known as the Ventureño Chumash, this group was distinguished from their culturally similar neighbors on the basis of linguistic variations noted by the early Spanish missionaries of the area, rather than by any apparent di erence in social or economic organization. The Ventureño (so named because of their association with Mission San Buenaventura) were the southernmost of all the Chumash peoples. Native American culture in this region evolved over the course of at least 13,000 years and has been described as having achieved a level of social, political, and economic complexity not ordinarily associated with huntergatherer groups. Ethnographic information about the culture is most extensive for the coastal populations, and the culture and society have been well documented for groups such as the Barbareño and Ventureño Chumash. Much of what is known of the Ventureño has been provided by the journals of early Spanish explorers and by accounts from the Chumash. All of Ojai and the surrounding county and federal land is archaeologically sensitive —and you only have to walk down Ojai Avenue and look right and left at the mountains rising up on both sides, leaving a lush but condensed paradise in between. Once, not too long ago, water fl owed freely in streams, creeks, and of course the Ventura River. Soule Park was once a marsh that hosted thousands of birds, both migratory and local. Animal life was abundant, as were the thousands of plants and trees that produced the food and raw materials that the Chumash used to make their homes here for thousands of years. One of the factors that led to the prominence of the Chumash was the acorn, and when I see one laying under an old oak tree, I marvel at the transformation that the taming of the acorn brought to the Chumash people. The acorn is permeated with tannic acid, making it a grim meal at best, but the Chumash people learned to leach the acid out, pound it into a paste, and make a cake from it.

While the ability to eat the acorn was a huge benefi t, its ability to be stored over the winter months was what made it a game changer, and the population grew and grew.

The Ventureño exploited a wide variety of natural resources within an ecosystem similar to that of their neighbors in Santa Barbara County. The limited area occupied by the Barbareño Chumash, a narrow coastal plain bounded on the north by the Santa Ynez Mountains, combined with a productive nearshore fi shery, resulted in the establishment of substantial permanent villages. These large villages provided centralized locations from which the inhabitants ventured out to exploit available resources and to disperse their surplus resources and manufactured goods through intervillage exchange networks. There are several known villages in the Ojai area as well as specialized sites that were functionally limited to one or two uses, like acorn-gathering sites or hunting sites situated along creeks and the Ventura River. The Ojai Valley Museum has a pilot program to date these sites through radiocarbon dating and have successfully found one village with two di erent time points, 994 AD and 252 AD. Whether the site was used before or after those dates is as yet unknown. I like to think of artifacts of these past cultures as words that in context form sentences, paragraphs, and books, essentially telling us the history of these cultures. This is why artifacts, in their original locations, are very important to inform us of these ancient cultures and to give back some of the lost history to the modern day Ventureño Chumash. Sometimes these “words” of the past of Ojai are hidden in plain sight in today’s planter beds and rock walls, scattered across the open ground, peeking out from under cinder block walls, and exposed in street utility trenches and plowed fi elds. Many of our known archaeological sites have been destroyed in the last 250 years. Some are buried under alluvial fans that make up the northern half of the Ojai Valley, but no one knows how many are present. Of the few known sites that are left, only a couple have been archaeologically excavated, and several of those were done in the 1960s when archaeological methods were still being developed. Early Spanish explorers to the coastal Chumash village of Shisholop, located in what we now know as the City of Ventura, reports having been met by “many very good canoes, each of which held 12 or 13 Indians.” This prompted the visitors to name the settlement the Pueblo de las Canoas.

On display at the Ojai Valley Museum is a rare basket water bottle also called a “water olla.” The basket was made, then the inside was coated with local tar to seal it and then use it as a canteen.

A group of Franciscan Padres described the native “pueblo” as consisting of 30 large houses with no fewer than 400 inhabitants. The fi rst Roman Catholic Mass was celebrated at this time, the location was renamed La Asunción de Nuestra Señora, and the seeds of the coming Spanish mission system were planted in the local populace. On Easter Sunday, March 31, 1782, Junipero Serra established the new “Mission of the Seraphic Doctor, San Buenaventura,” bringing about dramatic changes in the Chumash way of life.

Between the time of the establishment of the Mission San Buenaventura (and that of Mexican independence) and the secularization of the mission lands nearly 50 years later, ancient lifeways gradually began to disappear. Villages were abandoned, traditional marriage patterns were inhibited, hunting and gathering activities were disrupted as newly introduced agricultural practices altered the landscape, and large portions of the native population died from European diseases for which they lacked immunities.

Today the local Chumash, the Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians led by Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, is a vibrant and proactive community conducting blessings, ceremonies, and other community services. In addition, the group regularly reviews development plans to determine if they could potentially impact archaeological resources or sacred sites which still exist in the Ojai area. Band members are actively being trained in archaeological methods and processes so that they can judge for themselves what is found rather than relying on archaeolgists to tell them what is going on when something is discovered.

Archaeological research and interpretation of our Ojai sites and artifacts is important not only to science but also in bringing to light the long-buried knowledge of ancient life for our Chumash friends. A shared community memory leads to deeper understanding and stronger bonds for all of us today.

Seeds of the Moon:

A look at acorns in Chumash cuisine

by MIMI WALKER photos by JOHN M. FOSTER

Acorns—or `Ixpanəš in the Chumash language— have long played an integral role in the tribe’s culture and seasons of life. They are the seeds of the oak tree, and early Chumash people were known as “Oak Grove” people, living under and amongst the kuw’ and ta (Chumashan for the live oak and valley oak trees, respectively). In Chumash culture, oaks are called “children of the moon”; this term denotes their signifi cance as a guiding force that often appeared in Chumash people’s vision quests.

An acorn’s purpose was multifarious; it could be used for making necklaces, toys akin to a spinning top, and even— when crushed up—used as a hair gel to soothe women’s scalps after searing their bangs with fi rewood to trim them. Eventually, the people came to use the acorn in their daily cooking. Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, Chairperson of the Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians, explains how this may have come to be:

“Someone was brave enough to try. Maybe they had visions that came through dream time, perhaps seeing an old ancestor saying ‘try this.’ These oaks served as a community for so many animals — everybody enjoyed many parts of the tree, in their burrowing, nesting, etc. However, not many of the animals ate the acorns straight from the tree. They’d go and bury them: scrub jays, coyotes, squirrels. Squirrels and scrub jays were responsible for our beautiful oak groves. They’d buried so many acorns it was impossible to keep track. They see the sprouts from the seed, the rain comes and naturally leaches the acorns, and then the animals come and dig them up. The Chumash people must have tasted it and realized it wasn’t bitter anymore. They couldn’t wait for the rains to fi nish o their plantings. They looked to the water for their source to help them eat acorns immediately.” The Chumash began collecting the acorns, drying them in the sun, shelling them, then setting them in granary baskets lined with white sage to ward o bugs. They would then be pounded into a fi ne powder with a stone mortar and pestle or on bedrock mortars on the riverbed. They’d go into yet another basket (a 14-basket process in total) to be soaked and fi ltered of their bitter tannins, either by using an asphaltumlined water bottle or by dipping the basket in a creek. The fi nal result would

be a light fl our, not unlike cream of wheat, that was then mixed with water and constantly stirred with hot rocks and made into a mushy soup eaten three times daily. Sometimes, acorn soup would be seasoned with salt or seaweed and was often eaten with a mussel shell as a spoon. The powder itself is a perfectly usable fl our for baked goods, and can be made at home without quite as many steps, though you may still need to be up for a bit of a challenge to take on the task. Says Julie Tumamait-Stenslie: “Gathering is a very tedious process. It takes 200 acorns to yield a cup of fl our. I like the big giant ones—there’s hardly any skin on them. You don’t want to collect any acorns with holes in them— little worms can get in there. What I do is crack them open immediately … if you leave them in the shell, they rot. They have a high water content.”

She dries them out in her oven and grinds them up in a food processor. Then she puts the fl our in a glass bowl and rinses every 30 minutes or so totalling around 12 rinsings a day (pouring o the water in between — keep the fl our in the bowl!), tending to the house and kids in the gaps. When fi ltering is complete (the fl our will always be a tiny bit bitter, but that will dissipate immediately once it’s back in the oven), she wrings out the meal in a cheesecloth and dries it one more time in the oven or in the sun. You can blend one more time to your desired consistency. Don’t store it in plastic — it will sweat and grow mold. Use glass instead. Though it does “…take all day,” Tumamait-Stenslie fi nds the homemade processing of the fl our “meditative.” Of course, you can always order the fl our online or fi nd some in a specialty Asian supermarket. Acorn fl our and starch is used to make noodles (dotoriguksu) and even a gelatin (Dotori-muk) in Korea. It is a whole fl our, naturally gluten-free and loaded with complex carbohydrates. Here’s a recipe adaptation for Acorn Cookies, courtesy of Gerry Browning of the Museum of Ventura County.

ACORN COOKIES

1 cup butter or margarine 1 3/4 cups brown sugar 2 eggs 1 cup toasted coconut, ground up fi ne 1 1/2 cups fl our 3 cups oat bran 1 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 1 cup ground, leached acorns, toasted

Mix ingredients into a dough and chill. Roll into 1 inch balls and bake on a greased cookie sheet for 15-18 minutes at 350 degrees. Makes about 10 dozen cookies.

HOW TO LEACH AND TOAST ACORNS

Gather fresh acorns; wash in running water to clean o surface dirt. Crack open and use only clean white acorns (acorns will turn brown as the air hits them; this is OK, they are a starch). Toss away any rotten or buggy acorns. Place acorns on a cookie sheet and roast in a low oven at 325 degrees for 45 minutes. Let cool. Place 1-2 cups in a blender and grind into fl our. Transfering to a glass bowl, fi ll the container with cool or warm water to the top, covering the acorn fl our. Let the water sit for 15-20 minutes, pour o the water and keep the fl our in the container. Replace water and repeat process; as you do, you’ll see a change in the color of the water. After 12 or so changes of water, you can taste the acorns. If it’s not bitter (or not too bitter), it is ready (NOTE: if you fi nd that it’s late and you haven’t fi nished, cover container, put in the fridge, and start again in the morning). If acorns are ready, get as much water out as possible, using a strainer with a piece of cheesecloth or a paper towel. Spread wet acorn fl our on cookie sheet and dry in a very low oven, 250 degrees for 30 minutes. Let cool. Place back into blender and reblend into fl our. Store in an airtight glass container and refrigerate; use within one week or freeze it. Please remember that the acorn is the oak’s o spring and one of God’s creations. Show respect by making an o ering after you have gathered the acorns. Example: leave sage or tobacco, hair for the birds to use as a nest, or any other kind of food o erings. Say a prayer of thanks and honor the tree.