Tomols
& Healthy
Watersheds

by
Julie Cordero

 

As the Santa Barbara communities learn to connect to the environment we all share in common, the traditional wisdom and knowledge of this area’s indigenous people have inspired many. What many do not know, however, is just how dynamically active a role today’s Native People play in these communities’ relearning the principles of sustainable living. The Chumash Maritime Association’s mission is to revitalize and advance a dynamic coastal indigenous culture by building both tomols (traditional plank canoes) and traditional ways of respect for earth, ocean, and each other. In partnership with local groups and governmental entities mobilized to clean up the Arroyo Burro creek/beach watershed, CMA will further its mission through programs and activities at its Tomol House. This collaborative program, which includes the Community Environmental Council, the Audubon Society, Chumash Maritime Association, CURE, Santa Barbara SEA, Surfriders Foundation, Santa Barbara Urban Creeks Council, UC Cooperative Extension, 4-H, Santa Barbara County, and the City of Santa Barbara, will be housed at the new South Coast Watershed Resource Center at Arroyo Burro County Park (aka Hendry’s Beach). The Chumash Maritime Association Tomol House will be constructed in a secure area where tomols may be built, maintained, repaired and stored. During the negotiation process for this space, the very pertinent question was raised: What does a boat-building area have to do with watershed restoration and education?

The following is my response:

The religious, scientific, and artistic traditions of Native Americans were developed as an integral part of the ecosystems that comprise each Nation’s traditional homeland. Many Native People recognize that the very bodies of land, water and the plants taught us our languages, our arts, our medical practices, our social systems, our natural sciences, and (encompassing all those facets of our cultures), our religious beliefs and ceremonies. As our ancestors observed and learned from the natural world, there developed, in harmony with their belief in the consciousness of all things, sophisticated bodies of biological and religious knowledge that were transmitted orally over thousands of years.

One of the ultimate expressions of this knowledge and respect for the land, the recently built Chumash canoe ’Elye’wun (Barbareno Chumash word for swordfish) shines like a gem on the blue Channel waters. Completed in August of 1997, ’Elye’wun was crafted by hand without the use of nails, pegs, or an internal frame. Built using the ancient math of our ancestors B which plot the precise angle of each board’s position against the next and accounts for water displacement B the tomol is a functional, beautiful work of art in her own right. But she is much more than this. The tomol, and the fact that she was created by and for the use of the Chumash people, is a symbol of Chumash cultural re-emergence. But this re-emergence cannot fully come to light unless it occurs in context with the careful, knowledgeable, and sustainable restoration of our ancestral ecosystems.

Out of necessity, due to the scarcity of traditional plant materials, ’Elye’wun was crafted using modern materials and modern boatbuilding techniques. Using the math of the ancestors, we built this canoe by looking to the past, while keeping one eye on the present day. As we paddle the tomol in the ocean, we look with this same 20/20 clarity at all that has happened to the waterways of our homeland. ’Elye’wun is our daily reminder that with the degradation of our waterways, the riparian plants used as traditional tomol-building materials are fast disappearing. Once thriving watersheds in an otherwise semi-arid land, our creeks have been diverted, culverted, and biologically and chemically invaded and are missing many of their native plant species. One species is of particular concern to tomol-builders. Dogbane, or Apocynum cannabinum, is a special plant used by the Chumash and other California Nations for thousands years for making very strong, supple, weather-resistant cordage. Due to its usefulness in rope making, this plant is also known as Indian Hemp. It bears fine, red fibers nearly as strong and soft as silk. Dogbane cordage shrinks and becomes even stronger when immersed in water, making it ideal for maritime use. Since planks of the tomol are literally sewn together using the dogbane cordage, the canoe becomes structurally more stable while it is wet.

Dogbane, a member of the family Apocynacae, once thrived along the higher-elevation riparian areas of what is now Santa Barbara County. To create the amount of cordage necessary to build a single tomol B approximately 2 miles B was a matter of gathering enough dead, dry stalks in the late fall and early winter, and twining cordage throughout the rainy winter months. Today, since there are only two wild stands of dogbane left in Santa Barbara County, this is a much more difficult matter. The ethical, sustainable gathering of enough dogbane to create enough cordage to lash together a single tomol is taking several years. It is not only our ability to build tomols in the traditional way that has suffered. If only that were true! Our creeks are in such bad shape that areas where our grandfathers hooked great numbers of steelhead and other fish have not yielded much besides coliform bacteria in many years. In our ancient traditions, we understand that to remove one strand in the web of an ecosystem is to affect the entire web. What has been removed, the ability of our watersheds to function properly, is such a fundamental strand of this web, that the unraveling of the South Coast riparian ecosystems has happened with astonishing speed. In my family’s photo albums, there is a picture of my grandfather Bob Cordero standing by a large river, grinning ear to ear and holding up a large string of steelhead. When I was a child, I thought the picture was taken during one of his fishing trips to Northwest Washington or Idaho. When my mother informed me the photo was taken by the Ventura River less than fifty years ago, I was stunned. The Ventura River was recently named the third most ecologically devastated river in the United States. So much wrong has happened in so short a time.

The indigenous people of this area care deeply about all the different affects of this environmental destruction: that the beaches are closed because people are getting sick, that there are no steelhead, that the wetlands birds, which once flocked in such huge numbers they nearly blotted out the sun, are now few and far between. We care about the water not being safe for people to drink, and we cry as we watch our precious plants, which continue to form the foundation of our culture, identity, and spiritual practices, disappear, species by species. Our stories tell us of a time, a very short time ago, when our world was in balance, and hugely productive, and when our roles, determined by the land itself, were very clear. We see the contrast with those times with stunning clarity every time we look upon what used to be a fresh-running body of water, alive with steelhead and lush with native plant species, and which are now the contaminated, dying bodies of Arroyo Burro Creek, the Ventura and Santa Ynez Rivers, Maria Ygnacio Creek, Mission Creek and dozens of others. With equal attention, we have watched as other Native Nations, in collaboration with local scientists, community activists, and county, city, and state government agencies, have worked together to restore wetlands areas – once considered beyond hope – back to a state close to pristine condition. For example, salmon runs on the Muck Creek in Olympia, Washington, after years of careful community, tribal, and government collaboration and restoration work, are experiencing the largest return of spawning red salmon in half a century.

Ever so often, in the course of a successful habitat restoration, the unexpected has happened: plant and animal species thought to have long disappeared make a re-appearance and even thrive as their native habitats flourish. Those species are sometimes called "indicator species," as they act as a sort of ecological barometer measuring the beginning of an ecosystem’s collapse. If those crucial species reappear, it is as if the song of nature has conducted a reprise of a priceless harmony, the harmony of the spheres of life, which herald a return to health and balance for all living things.

A traditionally built Chumash tomol, bound together with 2 miles of respectfully tended, sustainably gathered dogbane cordage, is both a spiritually symbolic and an ecologically literal indicator of the returning health and balance of South Coast riparian ecosystems. The tomol is more than a beautiful, handcrafted wooden boat, she is our balancing point, our fulcrum between our world and the world of our ancestors. Between the earth that gave us the plants to build the canoe so we can fish and the ocean that gives us the fish. Between our skilled, practical, ecological knowledge of this land, and our humility and awe in the face of the Pacific Ocean. Between our birthright as descendants of this land and our obligation to serve the people. The tomol is the embodiment of our commitment to this land and the water. She is our living prayer for survival that is simultaneously an ecologically sound expression of the methods to do so.

Julie Cordero can be reached at 899-3689. She also wrote "A Chumash Perspective" in issue #22.