Little Choice for the Chumash: Colonialism, Cattle, and Coercion in Mission Period California

Archaeological data indicate that the Chumash people and their ancestors lived, thrived, and survived along the California Coast for at least eleven thousand years.¹ Over the millennia, they adapted to environmental conditions that included high resource productivity and diversity, as well as to regular perturbations in local environments that included droughts, El Niño events, and other cyclical changes operating on a variety of scales.² For the coastal Chumash in particular, the close juxtaposition of a variety of marine and terrestrial habitats, intensive upwelling in coastal waters, and intentional burning of the landscape made the Santa Barbara Channel region one of the most resource-abundant places on the planet.³ This natural diversity and productivity supported the Chumash and their culture, allowing the sociopolitical and technological culture to remain relatively stable for millennia.⁴

With the colonization of Alta California by Europeans beginning in AD 1769, however, came a series of unprecedented blows to the Chumash and their traditional lifeways. Anthropologists, historians, and other scholars have long been interested in documenting the collision of cultures that accompanied the European exploration and settlement of the Americas. Only recently have more realistic examinations of this "American Apocalypse" become widely available or have Native people published these histories in their own words.⁵ In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Chumash elders provided a rich body of ethnographic data for anthropologists and other scholars to mine, but the published record of Chumash history has been told, translated, and interpreted primarily by non-Native scholars.⁶ Today, the use of ethnographic information and trends in Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies inform the work of Native scholars in the retelling of their histories and have inspired us to address a previously unexamined bias that underpins popular published accounts of Chumash history.

We recognize that deeply submerged or ingrained in the intellectual history of Western science resistance to a full accounting of this apocalyptic history is still widespread and takes a variety of forms. In California, many early histories virtually ignored Native peoples or portrayed California Indians as primitive "diggers" whose cultures were extinct. Others were "white-washed" accounts of life at the missions that served as the colonial tools of the Spanish government.⁷ Some recent accounts are more subtle, questioning the identity and authenticity of Native peoples, especially those who demand the repatriation of museum collections or criticize anthropologists for not adequately protecting traditional cultural values, including village, cemetery, and sacred sites.⁸

Another anthropological approach is to explain postcontact changes in Native Californian societies as responses to something other than colonial oppression, especially droughts or cyclical resource shortages caused by overpopulation, overexploitation of resources, or environmental fluctuations.⁹ In such ecological scenarios, California Indians who moved to the Spanish missions made "optimal" or "risk-minimization" choices primarily to avoid problems associated with harsh or unstable climatic conditions. As a result, primary blame for the consequences of such choices is deflected away from Franciscan fathers, Spanish soldiers, and European colonialism and toward the vagaries of nature.

In this article, we examine aspects of one recent example of this last anthropological genre, a complex paper on the missionization of the Chumash Indians of the California Coast published in American Anthropologist by Daniel O. Larson, John R. Johnson, and Joel C. Michaelson (1994).¹⁰ Our intent is not to denigrate the authors of that article—two of whom are old friends of the junior author—but to explore the implications of such explanations, reexamine some of the data on which they are based, and present ethnohistorical data that indict Spanish colonialism as the primary cause of the wrenching cultural changes that afflicted the Chumash between about AD 1542 and AD 1834.

Background

When Spanish explorers first entered the Santa Barbara Channel area in AD 1542, they found Chumash-speaking peoples occupying the...