Yak Tityu Tityu, Northern Chumash, and the Chumash:
A General Overview
by Karl Kempton
Edited by Carol Georgi
Part Two, Section B
Preface
Part Two, Section B, continues the Chumash Ethnosphere by briefly covering the Chumash language, a continuation of archaeo-astronomy with associated narratives and symbols, and the rise of the overriding dominant culture. The "ethnosphere," a term coined by Wade Davis, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, is defined as "The sum total of all thoughts, dreams, ideas, beliefs, myths, intuitions, and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. It's a symbol of all that we've accomplished and all that we can accomplish." (Utne.com - Tales of the Ethnosphere). For the Chumash in general and for the local northern Chumash, Yak Tityu Tityu, this includes their relationship with ocean, land, coast and their belief and experience that all life and that which supports life are sacred. Part One was published in the August, 2011, SLO Coast Journal, and Part Two A was published in the September, 2011, SLO Coast Journal.
Introduction
This part of the article is the continuation of two previous sections, giving a short overview of the Chumash Native American Culture. The Chumash "First Peoples" history and accomplishments illustrate the wide and deep sophistication of the culture. However, all too often, writers diminish the Chumash People as merely holding the beauty and richness of their homeland area as caretakers until the European arrival, exploitation, and destruction of coastal wetlands, countless sacred sites, most of the Chumash themselves and their culture. From my point of view and that of many Chumash, too many local and regional archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and other writers have not understood, valued nor honored the Chumash, who number today in the thousands.
To comprehend the Chumash:
Consider for a moment the California Central and South Coast landscape and oceanscape being sacred space where every sound heard is a sacred vibration, every major and minor scape point sacred with its narrative sung thousands of years in harmony with all life.
Consider the Chumash religious Spiritual Way, its moral code, its disciplines leading to the meeting place of inner and outer balance, its spiritual view from a sacred apex of unity through the three worlds of above and below with a middle world consisting of complex woven interplays of individual and kindred spiritual beings dwelling on land, ocean, and in air.
Consider the width and depth of the First People's vocalization of landscape and oceanscape, the warp and weft of their spiritual matrix erased by the intolerant invader's tongues by renaming a landscape that was rapidly and radically changed by agriculture, towns, and cities. The invaders conquered and nearly obliterated the Chumash and their culture that had endured and grown for more than 14,000 years (official carbon date; unofficial carbon date 20,000 years).
While not all of their songs have disappeared, many continue to be sung by the Chumash. However, much of the entire spectrum has been lost. That is to say, one song probably had its variations for each language and within each language its variations by dialect. What has been lost is a significant percentage of a vast cultural and spiritual treasure of songs in four to six languages with their uncounted dialects sung many thousands of years.
The Chumash cultures of the traditional Ways were as intuitive as they were empirical; the culture was formed collectively by the identical humankind brain capacity as ours and the same powerful loving heart. The following hints at what remains and what can be extrapolated.
Language
Approximately 7000 languages are spoken today. Half are not being taught by parents to their respective children. About every two weeks a language dies. As Davis eloquently states, "A language is not just vocabulary and grammar. It's a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle though which the soul of a culture comes into the material world" (Utne.com - Tales of the Ethnosphere). Bucking that trend, the Chumash are bringing their language back, or at least one of them.
Nearly a hundred years ago, Edward Sapir, anthropologist and linguist, supposed a widely flung Hokan language family ranging from Northern California, east to the Colorado River Basin, and south to Central and Southern California. Sapir, then followed by anthropologist Krober, brought the Chumash language into the Hokan family. Sapir's work and that of Krober was an early attempt to map California First Peoples' languages. To be fair, both were cautious about Chumash being part of the Hokan family; they were very clear in their uncertainty. Their caution unfortunately was not registered on Krobers' language map in his Handbook of the Indians of California that is assumed to be a reliable source of information even though it was first published in 1925.
Chumash is now considered to be its own distinct language family. Even Krobers' Chumash boundaries are wrong in the Yak Tityu Tityu area. He had drawn the northernmost Chumash boundary bisecting Estero Bay, which makes no natural geographical sense. He also speculated without archaeological information a nonexistent southwest Salinian group populating Chumash territory from Paso Robles west to mid-Estero Bay and north to Ragged Point. As shown in Part One, archaeological and marrage patterns from mission records are Yak Tityu Tityu.
The term, Chumash, is a European made-up designation that is traced to people living on either Santa Barbara Island or Santa Cruz Island. Apparently lost is the general name by which the First People living between Malibu Canyon and Ragged Point called themselves and the name of the language they spoke and sang. There are four to six distinct Chumash languages, depending upon one's information source, differing as Spanish, Portuguese, French or Italian. Unfortunately, each is named after the mission that sparked the attempted complete ethnic and cultural annihilation. The number of dialects was numerous within each language area. The Chumash in the area of Santa Ynez call their language Samala.
The term, Yak Tityu Tityu, The People, comes from the northern language. The language of the northern speakers is considered the most distinct of the Chumash language family. If Chumash was a Hokan language, it would have more than six Salinian terms, a Hokan speaking people to their north. The second most distinct language is that of the islands: it has both words widely shared with the Chumash languages along the mainland from Point Conception to Malibu Creek in Southern California as well as many other words the source of which remains unknown.
One of the early questions put to the Chumash was, "How long have your people lived here?" Their reply, "We are the First People; we have always been here. First, we lived on the islands, and then crossed to the land." Had archaeologists and anthropologists listened and accepted their word, trees would not have given their lives for false theories and projections. This perception seems to follow, however, the general scientific model of nearly all archaeology: "Reject the oral traditions of traditional peoples until proven without a doubt," rather than accept the oral traditions until proven otherwise. Lack of respect comes in many forms.
A local example of this model can be found in the 2004 publication of the San Luis Obispo County Archaeological Society Occasional Paper 17: Emerging from the Ice Age, Early Holocene Occupations on the California Central Coast wherein I could not find in the body of the various collected papers mention of the Chumash as a people, only that there was a culture named after an artifact. As far as I know, there is no evidence of a radical shift of artifacts in all the dug-up sites along the coast that would indicate a change in peoples living here until of course the European invasion. This omission, in my opinion, is considerable disrespect to the Chumash.
Language and Archaeo-astronomy
It is now widely accepted that the Chumash were astronomical experts who made and shaped many solstice and stellar sites. It is also known the Chumash followed a year cycle with twelve divisions. A full recovery of astronomical information regarding solstice, equinox, unspecified sacred calendar days, lunar, planetary, and stellar alignments would require a full year encampment and team at several sites. There are many sites with ocean views and thus potential nearshore and offshore alignments. The team would consist of Chumash representatives and those they could trust to record the year long observations. But this would not recover their lunar alignments since the lunar cycle is 18.6 years long, nor the longer planetary cycles.
We use the terms sunrise and sunset, knowing the sun does not orbit the Earth. Yet we continue to state and experience the illusion we know not to be true. We say the sun is up; but relative to the Earth, it is out above or below the ecliptic appearing to move 47 degrees during the year. The sun does not rise nor set, the Earth's rotation uncovers and covers the sun forming the events of first and last sun light.
Locally there is a deep mystery of language and an archetype that refused to be suppressed. First, consider for a moment that our Anglo American English has monosyllabic and increased acronymic tendencies. Our tongue muscles have become cultivated to compress what they can into monosyllables or acronyms. Note its compressing and application for the "City of San Luis Obispo" and "San Luis Obispo County," both of which are named after the saint of the local mission. The American English tongue muscled for compression reduces and squeezes out the simplest possible SLO.
Surviving Yak Tityu Tityu descendants inwardly smiled, I am sure, about SLO long before I noticed, over thirty years ago, the irony of this American English signifier. In Chumash language dictionaries I have access to, the word for eagle is "slo'w" for most the the languages. That is, this word does not vary. The sound "SLO" also means Sky Eagle. "Slo'w" is one of the major Sky People of the upper world. The moon phases are caused by its wings as well as eclipses.
The eye of Sky Eagle is the Pole Star, the North Star, also named "Slo'w." "SLO" pushed its way through the layers of Spanish, Mexican and American English languages — particularly and significantly — in the northern most Chumash speaking area. Concerning this uptrust, Yak Tityu Tityu maintain a tight lip with a knowing sparkle in their eyes.
The importance of the Pole Star as a focal point becomes obvious once its role in northern hemisphere cultures is revealed at physical, mental and metaphysical levels of meaning and application. This is the reason for the discussion in Section A on the Pole Star and underscoring its midday alignment with the sun on the Winter Solstice.
The physical aspect of the Pole Star is obvious when discussing an ocean traveling and fishing culture. It keeps their craft aligned to purpose once sunlight disappears; it is the most important star for navigation. Traveling on land at night, it also serves as a ready guide. At a psychological level it is a model as a focal point for organization. It is also a central point for craft and art, say a basket's center point or the center point for astronomical rock art mandalas. It is also represented as the fire around which a significant night time ceremonial dance occurs. The deeper layer is its metaphysical symbol as a point of concentration and portal. Worldwide, it is the entry point into heaven. For the Chumash this would be above the third layer of the Sky People.
As mentioned before, there are Chumash rock art figures with the representation of consciousness rising out of the head. The Hopi (Native Americans) have at least two meanings for their word, "sipapu": (1) the entry hole through which the ancestors arrived from the world below, the third world, and (2) the crown on the head. Note that in India's spiritual tradition, this is the thousand pealed lotus crown chakra. In India, the direction of north on the human body is the head. This for me is a means by which to understand the significance of these few known Chumash rock art figures. For me it suggests that the Chumash Way, like many others around the world, contains transcendent focus and goal aspects. A major focal point is the Pole Star around which all the Sky People rotate.
Printed Chumash narratives are short; this runs counter to oral traditions with their long and complex narratives either told or sung. As a result, we know little about each character, it's various relationships with others and the environment. Important hints, however, remain. For example and germane to the Pole Star is one of the longer printed Chumash narratives; it is about seven abandoned boys. Their respective mothers rejected them because the step fathers did not want them. We really do not know why they were rejected, who they were, nor their status. Raccoon found and fed them. We do not know who Raccoon is. One of the boys had a desire to fly which is passed on to the other six. After days of attempts and partial flight they become white snow geese, a bird from the North, and turned into the stars of the Big Dipper, guardians of the Pole Star.
Some apply this narrative of the seven boys to the Pleiades. In astronomy, the Pleiades (Greek root), or Seven Sisters (Greek root), is an open star cluster located in the constellation Taurus. It is among the nearest star clusters to Earth and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky. The Pleiades has several meanings in different cultures and traditions <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades>. The Chumash narrative specific to the Pleiades tells of a missing eighth wise man; that is to say, the Chumash song originally was composed when eight stars were visible in the Pleiades representing wise men. Elsewhere, now that only six stars are visible, stories and myths of the Pleiades mention a missing seventh individual.
Interestingly, The Eternal Dharma (Hindu; in Sanskrit, Sanatana Dharma) story of the Pole Star is an important clue to our understanding. Newly constructed temples of The Eternal Dharma continue to be built with the harmonic principles of the Vedas. The Vedas are ancient Hindu scriptures that date back more than 5000 years when first written down by Veda Vyasa after previous thousands of years of oral transmission. One principle of a temple is a relationship with the Pole Star. I outlined this principle to Rex Saint Onge (see part A) who, upon its first use by him, found an alignment site for Slo'w in Yak Tityu Tityu territory.
The following is a narrative of the Pole Star when it became Alpha Draco. The Rishis (enlightened poet-sages in India) mentioned in the story were alive around the same time as the Arlington Springs woman (who died and was buried 13,000 to 13,500 years ago on what is now called Santa Rosa Island), when Vega was the Pole Star. As the story unfolds, Dhruva was a five year old son of a king by the king's first wife. His stepmother, the younger second wife, was the king's favorite. Attempting one day to sit on his father's lap while the step mother was present, Dhruva was insulted by her saying he had no right to sit on his lap unless he is reborn through her. He left ashamed and determined to seek Vishnu. On his way to the forest, he met the immortal sage, Narada, who provided meditation instructions and a mantra. After steadfast meditation for six months under a sacred tree next to a sacred river, he reached a moment where he jarred the planet. This immediately brought the seven Rishis, the stars of the Big Dipper, to sit near him to protect the planet. His Bhakti Yoga or devotion soon brought Vishnu into his presence. Because of his ardent meditation and devotion, Vishnu eventually placed him in the sky as the Pole Star representing second to no one in unwavering devotion to Vishnu.
Overlapping themes between the Chumash and The Eternal Dharma narratives are uncanny: unwanted boys thrust aside by a parent and step parent achieve notable powers such that they are raised to sacred positions in the sky. In The Eternal Dharma, the white goose of the North represents the soul as it does for many First Peoples throughout North America. It can be seen in meditation. Again in The Eternal Dharma, the direction of the short path to enlightenment is The Path or Road of the North; the South is the long road leading to death and rebirth. There are many more global narratives and symbols with but this is not the place for such a prolonged discussion.
If one counts the four horizontal cardinal directions, the vertical up and down, and the inward, the directions of the Chumash Way totals seven. The Navaho (Native American) Beauty Way song has these same seven directions. The Eternal Dharma has eleven as it bisects the horizontal cardinal directions. If the solstice directions are brought in for the Chumash Way, they too count to eleven.
Consider there exists a deeper layer of symbolic meaning for the winter solstice site events where light descends at first light and ascends at last light. As a reminder from Section A, when the sun rises, sunlight descends and when the sun sets, sunlight ascends. During Self awareness, individual integration takes place along the inward direction with whatever form of the recognized spiritual energy of a particular Way may be. This is a means towards higher consciousness. When the moment occurs as recorded world wide, golden light descends within. Gold or the color of the sun often is a representative symbolic color. Christians would call the initial burst of such energy within as baptism by the Holy Ghost. Its hold is temporary like the Zen Flash of Satori and thus needs more work to be held within as a constant higher state of awareness. Countless names exist elsewhere and also names for the higher degrees of constant integrated awareness. For the Chumash, such wizened individuals would be guides held in high regard until the body dies, then that light-filled soul ascends. The Chumash ceremonies began before first light, continued all day, and lasted deep into the night.
If this seems a stretch, why do 14 of the 21 California missions have built within them solstice or equinox first light events? Last light events apparently have not been looked for yet. Only one European Cathedral, the Gothic Cathedral of Chartes in France is known to have a summer solstice event. That event is not an on going descent of light such as that found in the Santa Barbara Presidio Chapel in California. In this chapel there is a sequential event illuminating first a special shield, secondly Saint Francis and thirdly the main altar. Unfortunately, the exactness of these events has been lost along with the historical iconography. Earthquakes in the early 1800's caused considerable damage. The restoration was completed in 2005. The events come from reconstruction. Nevertheless, the Church found parallels in their own iconography and stories and wedded them to this type of ongoing sequential vertical descent of light mimicking a Chumash solstice event. (See: Andrew Gough and Presidio Light A Midwinter Solstice Event at the Presidio Chapel of Santa_Barbara)
Rise Of The Dominant Way
As stated in the general overview, Wade Davis mentioned the fire sweeping away much of the ethnosphere. While the sparks and matches setting the blaze are many, I would like to outline how, in a few broad strokes, the ways of the scythe, sword, and pen caused the loss of sacredness of place in Europe.
Modern humankind migrated into Europe about 45 to 40 thousand years ago with enough numbers to eventually overwhelm the Neanderthal populations and their Ways. It was not so much warfare as a more advanced tool kit coupled with more integrated and supportive social organization providing modern humankind a competitive advantage over resource control. Undisturbed for about 25,000 years, modern humankind's hunting and gathering groups settled in and developed their cosmological and spiritual ties to the land.
Loss of place as sacred begins with the movement of matricentered farming populations with their domesticated herd animals into Eastern Europe out of what is now Turkey ten thousand years ago. The migration and its expanding population base displaced hunters and gatherers and altered terrain over thousands of years with the Way of the Seed (to paraphrase Joseph Campbell). Upsetting the matricentered social structure began around 4000 BCE and ending around 1800 BCE were successive militant patriarchal invasion waves off the steppes, the last of which were the Indo-Europeans. The first pan-European empire was that of the Kelts breaking apart local non-Indo-European and Indo-European tribal structures. The Kelts, for the most part, left untouched local spiritual traditions on the one hand, but on the other hand generally the religion of the conquerer erodes the Way of the vanquished.
Urban centers developed in south eastern Europe where experience of the natural world was replaced by conceptual thought. Greek philosophy, still held dear, carries within it a disdain for nature as exemplified by Plato's quote of Socrates, "I am a lover of learning and the trees and open fields won't teach me anything only the men (my emphasis) of town. But I will follow you throughout the countryside like a cow following waved fruit if you hold a book before me."
Greek philosophy created early proto-rigid, scientific categories eventually dividing experience into mental categories filled, most often, with dull, uninspired prose. Thus began a left brain composed cosmology. Language, at first, was infected with these categories; then they became common assumptions in a new cosmological orthodoxy of perception that shaped behavior. Greek philosophy was absorbed into the Roman Empire.
The Roman Empire specifically attacked the Kelts to destroy their religious and spiritual Way. The final blow to a cosmological and spiritual wedding of place was struck by the Catholic Church that had no songs, narratives, nor sensitivity for sacred landscape due to a cosmology that conjured humankind's dominance over the natural world. Its cosmology was also steeped in the belief of a chosen people and religion; this justified dominance over other peoples. In the mid 1600's a magical mathematical backward counting from the Bible came the claim that the creation was only 6,000 years old.
The burnings of the witches—the herbal people—were aimed at those holding onto what remained of the Old Way. The final cord/chord of the old songs and stories of landscape and oceanscape was severed and silenced; place was no longer sacred space.
Literacy replaced oral memorized traditions. Manuscripts replaced extensive hours-long to day or days-long oral narratives and songs hundreds and thousands of years old and rooted even deeper. Prodigious memory capabilities and skills atrophied proportionate to library size, number of libraries, and publications. The emptied living experiential, spiritual and mystical Ways were eventually filled by an austere attempt at rational thought while ignorant of unconscious psychological forces.
In the mid 1600's a magical mathematical backward counting from the Bible came the claim that the creation was only 6,000 years old. Also in the 1600's Descartes claimed, "I think, therefore I am." His Cartesian geometry turned the sacred weaver's grid and the sacred basket weaver's matrix, once vibrating with natural world cosmological sung connections, into a barren and lifeless mathematical frame. The complex web of life and humankind's traditional spiritual relationships with the natural world were reduced to a mechanical expression. At this moment the reduction continues with the brain foolishly compared to a computer while no one using the comparison has seen the mind.
After Descartes died, the religious cosmology dating the creation as only 6,000 years old took hold in European culture. This date consciously and unconsciously constricted thought such that the mobility of humankind and the deep ages of traditional cultures were deemed impossible even into the late 20th Century. While recent recovery facts have overwhelmed old thinking, the unconscious has yet to let go thus the continuation of limiting expansive considerations of humankind's mobility and achievements in the past. A recent poll points to 40 per cent of Americans still hold to the 6,000 year old date. (See: Wikipedia - Young Earth Creationism)
Outside religious belief, left brain thinking achieved final victory, pushing all other observational and experiential faculties into the background with tragic consequences to humanity and the natural world. What can not be measured is delegated to the realms of maybe or possibly or not proven. What was an alive verb was killed. Its corpse is a dead noun that is easier to frame, measure, and exploit. It is also easier to ignore the unintended consequences of its exploitation leading us to where we now stand, on the fulcrum point of environmental collapse. (See BBC.co.uk - Science Environment)
For illustration, examine the categories of atmosphere and ocean, air and water, once assumed separate categories. We now know that every other breath we breathe comes from the ocean. At the meeting place of atmosphere and ocean, oxygen in vast quantities bubbles skyward. Focus on the molecular level of this oxygen exhale. Listen with your mind's ear the fizzing zone of not air and not water. But due to a mind set still in place, the ocean is assumed to be an infinite, inexhaustible resource. Its treatment has been and continues to be inexcusable: vast fish populations have plummeted, it's used as a septic tank for sewer treatment plant discharge, acidification by carbonic acid from carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, the right of entitlement by utilities to build once-through-cooling systems that kills billions of fish larvae per year, the right of entitlement by agriculture to destroy coastal wetlands and use rivers, streams and creeks as discharge gutters for toxic chemicals, etc. This is one half of the planet's lung, the blue lung; the other half is the plants and trees, the green lung under attack. The greater the obvious dangers caused by pollution, the greater the fight to deregulate not regulate the polluters.
Only now has the cutting edge of science realized the insights of the traditional peoples' understanding of the world in which we live: we are but a part of a huge vibrating planetary web of life that knows no categories. This cultural heritage is found in the Chumash eloquent, highly evolved vibratory celebration of kinship, unity and wholeness.
It is our hope and wish that the marine sanctuary program educates the general public about the importance of the Yak Tityu Tityu and the larger Chumash culture and its heritage. European descendants have lived on this land less than one per cent of the span of the Yak Tityu Tityu and Chumash generation count.
Resources
Blackburn, Thomas C., ed.; December's Child, a Book of Chumash Oral Narratives. University of California, Berkeley, 1975,359pp.
Grant, Campbell, The Rock Paintings of the Chumash. University of California, Berkeley, 1975, 163pp. caution — many of Grants reproductions are sloppy.
Hudson, Travis and Underhay, Ernesy; Crystals in the Sky, an Intellectual Odyssey Involving Chumash Astronomy, Cosmology and Rock Art. Ballena Press, 1978. caution -- oral tradition in places is overridden with authors own assumptions
Kempton, Karl. Alignment. Atticus Press, 1985.
"Rite Angles" manuscript in progress.
"The Way Of The Poet: God Realized Rishi & Yogi, Taoist & Buddhist Ch'an & Zen, Sufi and Christian Mystic Poets in the World's Many Spiritual and Mystic Traditions" manuscript in progress.
