• DOI:10.1353/aiq.2006.0020
• Corpus ID: 161990367

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

@article{DarttNewton2006LittleCF,
  title={Little Choice for the Chumash: Colonialism, Cattle, and Coercion in Mission Period California},
  author={Deana Jon Dartt-Newton and Jon M. Erlandson},
  journal={The American Indian Quarterly},
  year={2006},
  volume={30},
  pages={416 - 430}
}

• D. Dartt-Newton, J. Erlandson
• Published 6 September 2006
• History
• The American Indian Quarterly

Archaeological data indicate that the Chumash people and their ancestors lived, thrived, and survived along the California Coast for at least eleven thousand years. 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. 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. This natural diversity and productivity supported the Chumash and their culture, allowing the sociopolitical and technological culture to remain relatively stable for millennia. 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. 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. Today, the use of ethnographic information and