The Kumeyaay Before the Mission

Twelve thousand years before any Spanish soldier set foot in California, people were already living here. The Kumeyaay fished these shores from tule boats they built from the reeds growing at the edges of the marshes. They harvested shellfish from the bay. They paddled the estuaries where Mission Bay now holds jet skis and paddleboards. And they governed a territory so expansive that today it spans two nation-states, divided by a border that was drawn without their knowledge or consent.

When Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo anchored his ships in the bay on September twenty-eighth, fifteen forty-two, Kumeyaay people met him from the shore. They had been watching that horizon for twelve millennia. Cabrillo was not discovering an empty land. He was arriving at a place that was already fully known.

The mission era began in seventeen sixty-nine with Father Junipero Serra's founding of Mission San Diego de Alcala at the edge of Old Town, not far from where you are now. What the textbooks usually leave out is what happened six years later. On the night of November fourth to fifth, seventeen seventy-five, several hundred Kumeyaay warriors organized across the surrounding rancherias rose together. They attacked the mission, killed Father Luis Jayme, who became the first Christian martyr in California, and burned the mission buildings to their foundations. They destroyed the vestments, the sacred vessels, every object the Spanish had used to claim this land for God and crown. The uprising was organized by two Kumeyaay leaders, Zegotay and Aarazon. The Spanish captured them and imprisoned them. Their subsequent histories are largely absent from mission museum interpretation.

The Spanish rebuilt. They moved the mission inland and fortified it. History recorded this as a setback in a larger story of inevitable colonization. The Kumeyaay recorded it differently.

Today, twelve federally recognized Kumeyaay tribal nations govern within San Diego County. They are not remnants. They are not historical. The Viejas Band, the Barona Band, the Sycuan Band, and nine others represent continuous governance of this territory across the entirety of the Spanish, Mexican, and American periods. Their ceremonial landscape centers on Kuuchamaa, the mountain known to settlers as Tecate Peak, a site so sacred that Kumeyaay Nation members cross the United States-Mexico border under special provisions to reach ancestral sites on the Baja California side. The current border bisects their homeland. The homeland predates the border by twelve thousand years.

San Diego's history begins with the Kumeyaay. Not in seventeen sixty-nine.