The Chumash & The Channel Islands

To stand along the shores of Channel Islands National Park is to stand in the past.

The park, composed of five rocky and isolated islands situated just 20 miles off the coast of mainland Southern California, provides a window into what the landscape and ecology of California would have looked like pre-development, in the time before freeways and housing developments. Rolling chaparral hills covered in sagebrush and wildflowers give way to dramatic and sheer cliff faces that drop into seas filled with kelp and marine mammals.

The first view that welcomes visitors to the Channel Islands National Park is the arch of Anacapa, the eastern most part of the island chain and the closest to the mainland. Anacapa is the only island whose name is derived from the native name for the island, Ennepah. Loosely translated it means something along the lines of “mirage” or “deception.”

The islands are home to one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries in modern history. In 1959, a fragment of a femur was unearthed on Santa Rosa Island. Named after the sandstone canyon in which the bone fragment was found, “Arlington Springs Man” was discovered by Phil Orr and studied further by Dr. Johnson and his colleagues. Bone protein and radiocarbon analysis dated the remains to some 13,000 years ago — to the late Pleistocene when sea levels were lower, and the four northern Channel Islands were connected as one.  

Arguably, these are the earliest dated human remains in either North or South America. They prove that after plants and animals colonized the islands, the next wave of life— human life — arrived thousands of years earlier than we ever imagined.

The iridescent colors of an abalone shell shine against the backdrop of the ocean. Indigenous to the Channel Islands, the Chumash lived off the land and sea, hunting and gathering berries and other plants on the islands, and fishing and harvesting abalone and shellfish. Certain shells also became part of an early currency that allows the Chumash to develop far reaching trade routes.

These indigenous inhabitants of the Channel Islands are the Chumash and their story is deeply entwined with the islands. The Chumash fashioned tomols, plank canoes from driftwood, and sealed them with the natural tar that still trickles from fissures miles below the ocean surface. In these vessels, they braved the tumultuous conditions separating the islands from mainland California. Temporary fishing camps became dozens of permanent settlements home to hundreds. The sea and land offered a bounty that allowed the Chumash to thrive in the seemingly sparse chaparral landscape: shellfish like abalone from the shallows, large sport fish like tuna from the open ocean, myriad berries from the valleys and canyons. With food security, they were able to develop an early shell bead currency (Chumash is loosely derived from “makers of shell bead money”) that allowed them to establish trade routes that stretched as far north as present-day Washington State and as far east as the Rockies.

And in the Chumash tradition, this history stretches even further back than the 13,000-year-old Arlington Springs Man to the time of their creation. Passed through generations by oral tradition, The Rainbow Bridge story tells of the creation of the Chumash on Limuw (what we now know as Santa Cruz Island). There, they grew from the land and traveled over a rainbow to spread across the mainland. A people from and of the land.

And yet, in spite of this powerful history, the Chumash, like the islands themselves, often go overlooked. Like so many others, they were separated from their stories and their land. Centuries of balance were disrupted in mere decades of Western development. In order to honor their tradition and to fully restore and conserve the islands, we must work to revive a connection between a people and their land. One that runs deeper than anyone can imagine. 

Visitors to the islands hike along a bluff to the sea. Channel Islands National Park is one of the least visited National Parks in spite of its proximity to population centers like Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. 

Written and contributed by Alex Krowiak.