Editordude: Several years ago, before the pandemic, I spoke with San Diego historian and archaeologist Richard Carrico at an OB Historical Society event about his well-known book on San Diego’s Kumeyaay native peoples, Strangers in a Stolen Land. What had caught my attention in his book was a map of San Diego County with the locations of major Kumeyaay villages and I asked him about it, as I was at the time on a quest to learn more about them.
It had dawned on me that there are no markers for the major villages — even those that had been in what’s now Mission Valley — and I wanted to enlist Carrico’s assistance in a project I wanted to take on about identifying, locating and commemorating the Kumeyaay’s main villages within San Diego. Needless to say, the project was sidetracked. But here is an article from KPBS that is a beginning to fulfilling that quest.
By Amita Sharma / KPBS / April 18, 2024
Scan the crowd-sourced Historical Marker Database’s 375 entries for San Diego County and you’ll see a lot about Spanish colonial, early American settler and U.S. military pasts.
Just a handful of the markers mention the millennia-old history of Native Americans in the area. The database mostly ignores places where atrocities were committed against indigenous people.
The database is made of entries by the public, so it’s possible there are historical markers commemorating Native American history that are missing. San Diego historian and archaeologist Richard Carrico said if that’s the case, the omission of thousands of years of indigenous stories, tools and ways of life is less about blame and more an extension of how society views history before the arrival of Europeans.
“Crowdsourcing and those kinds of sites are a really good reflection of American culture and how we look at cultures,” he said. “That’s such an ethnocentric colonial view of things.”
For some of the descendants of the four major tribes that once populated the San Diego region — the Luiseno, Cahuilla, Cupeno and Kumeyaay — the historical marker database snub is typical and met with resignation.
“We’re used to it,” said Kumeyaay Community College President Stanley Rodriguez. “I view that as a form of hegemony that is based on a romanticized lie of what has taken place here.”
Rodriguez said the indigenous people of San Diego endured three waves of encroachment: the Spanish with the missions including the first called the San Diego Presidio, then the Spaniards born in Mexico, followed by the Americans. Indigenous people were forcibly converted. Families were split and turned into servants.
“The first governor of California, Peter Burnett, issued bounties on the heads of native people,” Rodriguez said. “Fifty cents for a child, $2.50 for a woman, $5 for men. Over $1.5 million was paid off. Our numbers prior to California becoming a state were over 85% native to 15% non-native. Within 20 years, the numbers had dropped by over 80%.”
Rodriguez said before the Spanish and American invasions, the Kumeyaay thrived.
“Very few people realize there was a very large Kumeyaay village here,” said Rodriguez, standing in Old Town San Diego. “There were communities all through San Diego, all through the bay, all around on the Silver Strand, Coronado, National City and downtown.“
He said men, women and children in the villages rose before the sun. Depending on the season, they’d make tule boats to fish. They would harvest salt, Torrey pine nuts, acorns, chia. They would trade shell beads, abalone, dried fish and lobster with other tribes in the desert and up north for corn, feathers, soap and stone.
Kumeyaay Community College President Stanley Rodriguez points to a grave marker in front of a cemetery in Old Town San Diego, March 21, 2024.
The historical markers database for San Diego County does include an entry for an old Kumeyaay natural kitchen, pictographs and the ancient Kumeyaay village Panhe.
But it omits the tribe’s at least 4,000-year-old history in what is today called the Ramona Grasslands Preserve.
“This is a Kumuyaay village site,” said Carrico, standing at the preserve. “It’s called Pa’mu which probably means ‘gathering place’ or ‘place of the singers’ because they had a lot of music and singing in their culture.”
The area had two springs, a female creek and a male one. Carrico said if a Kumeyaay woman wanted to have a son, she would drink from the male spring and vice versa. The land’s oak trees’ acorns were a major food source for the tribe. They traded shell beads.
“If you could go back in time, you would see huts sitting out here,” Carrico said. “They were doing a lot of tool manufacturing, and they were importing between lithic material, stone material, from as far away as Mammoth and from Baja, California, and from the Salton Sea area.”
Steve Banegas, chair of the museum committee at the Barona Cultural Center and Museum, believes leaving out whole histories of ethnic groups, whether in databases or classrooms, robs people of knowledge and understanding of their collective history.
“They’re missing a big chunk of humanity, a big chunk of spirituality, a big chunk of time,” Banegas said.
He contends the omissions not only doom humanity to repeat history, but keep people in the dark about who and what remains.
A sign in the museum is a reminder of Banegas’ message. It says of the Kumeyaay, “We’re still here!”
I read with interest the article, “Too Few Markers For Native American Sites,” given my past 56-years of trying to protect ancient Native American sites from housing construction and non-scientific digging. In those years, my fellow archaeologists and I have recorded over 16,000 Native American sites and practically fight a battle with treasure-hunters hell-bound to destroy those sites in search of pottery and arrowpoints they can hang on their walls. Land developers have destroyed more prehistoric sites than we have recorded and a very small percentage of the 16,000 were actually preserved in-place. Even the World famous rock art paintings in a Poway Park were destroyed by graffiti spray painters. Unless there is 24-hour security, posting the location of a prehistoric site will only invite treasure hunters. While I agree that we need to broadly recognize our Native American neighbors important places, we need to protect them as well.
Back in the 1980s, I made a promise to now deceased elders of the Campo Reservation that I would look out for ancestral lands. In 1984, I organized a defense of sacred lands on top of a high desert mountain in East County when a windmill developer applied for a permit to grade roads and install wind towers. After a long letter writing campaign, the wind tower permit was denied by the Bureau of Land Management. The last thing I would want to do is post a sign out there where no one can provide 24-hour security.
There is a world of difference posting historical signs on old buildings and posting signs on prehistoric sites.
There are long-lost village sites in Mission Valley that I’m thinking about. As people speed by on the freeways, they have no knowledge that they’re traveling over ancient sites of major indigenous towns. They need to. But I do get your concern. My concern is the major villages and their names and locations.