The Chumash: The Valley's First and Enduring People
Near Los Olivos, California
Long before olive trees or railroads, this valley belonged to the Chumash. Their homeland once stretched across roughly seven thousand square miles, from the beaches of Malibu north toward Paso Robles and inland to the edge of the San Joaquin Valley. They were skilled hunters, gatherers, and fishermen who lived in large dome-shaped houses framed from willow branches and who paddled the channel in sewn-plank canoes.
When Spanish missions arrived, the Chumash population collapsed, largely from European diseases, falling from an estimated fifteen to twenty thousand people before contact to only a few thousand mission-registered survivors within a couple of generations. Yet the people endured. On the twenty-seventh of December, nineteen oh one, the federal government set aside the Santa Ynez Reservation for them, a small parcel near the old mission lands.
For decades many members lived there without running water or electricity until a housing program in the late nineteen seventies transformed the community. Today the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians is the only federally recognized Chumash tribe in the nation, home to roughly one hundred fifty members. In August of two thousand three the tribe opened the Chumash Casino Resort, a large gaming and hotel complex east of Solvang that has become the economic engine funding the tribe's schools, health care, and cultural preservation.
