Chumash people

I can't imagine anything more traumatic.

The Indians had never seen ships like ours or men like us.

They fled in terror, leaving behind only empty huts and warm fires.

My people were the first ones to see the spaceship on the horizon, so to speak.

You don't get too far north of San Diego before you start to see these Channel Islands.

Four days later, we sighted two islands and named them after our ships.

Sailing close, we saw many Indians from the bluffs calling to us to come ashore.

Not only do the Channel Islands have people on them, they're one of the longest inhabited places on the face of the earth.

The second one, I'll just give a beautiful piece of advice that Rufus Silberstein brings in one of his Sfarim.

I think it's Sefer on, when it was earlier Sfarim, on Chumash.

He tells a, this is not about so much, this doesn't work so much for the Makhshava Hilchos Deos aspect.

It works more for the practical piece.

And as writers and folklorists of the 20th century began digging into the mystery, they wanted to give this legend a deeper, more ancient anchor.

So they began to ask, If the Spanish saw them in the 1700s, what about the people who were here for thousands of years before them? Now, this is where we have to do some detective work, because if you search the internet or watch any television segment on the Dark Watchers, you're going to hear a very common, highly repeated claim that the legend originates in the ancient pre-Columbian mythology of the Chumash people.

The Chumash have lived along the central California coast and the Channel Islands for over 13,000 years.

They are deeply spiritual people with a rich, complex oral history.

It seems incredibly plausible that they would have a name for the giants on the ridges.

But if you actually crack open the academic ethnographic record, the truth is far more complicated and in some ways a little bit stranger.

Between 1912 and 1928, an American linguist and ethnographer named John Peabody Harrington traveled throughout Central and Southern California.

He spent decades meticulously recording every song, myth, and word of the Chumash elders.

Abalone that grew to the size of a dinner plate, schools of sardines that darkened the sea like a change in the weather, tuna as long as grown men.

It fed the Chumash for millennia, and the Chumash worked out the one rule that everyone after them would ignore.

When the abalone thinned, you stopped.

and you let it come back.

It seems likely that they differ from the more typical Californians of the central region.

Their territory, however, physiographically forms part of the Great Basin and not of the Pacific coast, and even politically constitutes only a fringe along an artificial boundary of the state, so that they may be disregarded in the present connection as is the case everywhere there are no absolute breaks and few sharp ones between the several cultures that have been mentioned so that the areas occupied by each cannot be very definitely circumscribed as regards single characteristics there are many complete transitions and even identities between two or more cultures but the general type of life and native activity in each of the several areas in spite of such resemblances is quite distinct the numerous linguistic families of california though they must apparently still continue to be considered as generally unrelated fall into three groups each confined to a certain territory and containing languages of the same type of structure in the northwest the languages are rough and complex in the southwest they are also complex while over the greater part of the state they are phonetically smooth and morphologically simple case inflections taking the place of incorporation these three linguistic areas correspond approximately to the culture areas north of tehachapi the agreement is not exact for the saladin family of the salinas valley linguistically shows the southwestern type in more pronounced form than the Chumash of Santa Barbara, while culturally the Salonan Indians seem to have formed part not of the southwestern Santa Barbara area, but of the central one.

Nevertheless, it is quite clear that in a general way, the Indians of two rather restricted areas in northwestern and southwestern California can be affirmed to have been distinct from those of the main body of the state the character both of their languages and of their culture presenting in both respects a greater degree of complexity and development than the majority of the Indians of the state there is no reason to suppose any causal connection between these developments in the southwest and northwest ethnologically California may be said to be characterized by the absence of agriculture and of pottery by the total absence of totemism or Gentile organization by an unusually simple and loose social organization in which wealth plays for a somewhat primitive and an american group a rather important part by the very rude development of all arts except basketry by the lack in art of realism by a slight development of fetishism and by the conspicuous lack of the symbolism and ritualism so highly developed by most of the american indians by the marked prevalence of religious restrictions connected with birth death sexual matters and similar phases of life by the predominance among ceremonials of mourning and initiation rites and by a considerable development of true conceptions of creation in mythology these characteristics hold true in some degree almost throughout the entire state but in nearly every case they are most marked in the large central region the inhabitants of which may be justly regarded as the most typical of californians

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