Brave Anonymous - Checking the Records

Angry Anonymous has been telling me that the reservation was NOT the Chumash Reservation back in the 60’s. She told me to “check your records buddy. There is no reference WHATSOEVER to the Chumash reservation and CERTAINLY not 50 years ago”

Well she should probably talk to John R. Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Of course Anonymous probably knows much more than this distinguished gentleman who has been studying the Chumash for 30+ yrs now.

Ironically, from the POLO website:

http://www.polosyv.org/news/other/lifeOfPayouts.htm


“The population began to diminish in the early 19th century with the establishment of five mission-based communities in Chumash territory, according to John R. Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

A 1798 survey counted about 1,200 Chumash in 14 villages in the Santa Ynez Valley. In 1804, Old Mission Santa Ines was built. By 1856, the number of Chumash in the valley had dropped to 109 -- a 90% decline caused largely by measles, smallpox and other diseases introduced from Europe.

A small cemetery next to the mission cathedral holds the remains of about 1,700 Indians, marked by crumbled tombstones and splintered crosses covered in moss. One small headstone reads simply: "Baby."

During the late 1800s, the Catholic Church relocated the Chumash in Santa Ynez to Zanja de Cota Ranch, a 99-acre flood plain. The church eventually donated the land to the Indians, and in 1906, the U.S. government created the nation's only federally recognized Chumash reservation.”

"Santa Ynez was a frontier town," says Johnson, who has studied the Chumash for three decades. "Some of the Indians developed into pretty rough customers. A couple of them ended up in San Quentin. But they persisted. They were people who made the best of what they had."

The Armenta clan embodies the tribe's impoverished past and its perseverance. Loreto and Florencia Armenta raised 10 children on the reservation during the Depression. The family lived in a lean-to without walls or windows and slept on steel cots lined up on a dirt floor. They bathed in a swimming hole and wore clothes made from discarded flour sacks.”