San Diego's First People - Kumeyaay Native Americans

[Music] why Huck we die Who am I I felt the strength of the creations the winds and the great ocean waves the frozen skies and the burning lands I hear your thunder feel your lightning I smell the trees the plants and the flowers I taste the fruits and water so cure I hear your creature singing in cry greatest of the blue ocean above my Hawk we die I'm human I am man I am deep I everybody associates Indians with Plains Indians or you know the Mohawks or well known Indians but right here in this beautiful San Diego County there were KU me I people the reservations have been here for a hundred years and our people have been here for thousands of years the earliest sites that we have data in in San Diego County right now are about 10,000 years old and our people have been here we say from the beginning of time archeologists say thousands of years and they've seen the sites here in the by the coast and the mountains in the desert we have the most diverse geography of any of the tribe in the United States because we go from the coast to the mountains to the desert and our tear then our traditional territory what the communities kind of said about themselves is because it's such a harsh environment because it always is changing on them they learned how to best adapt themselves to the environment so they have this seasonal pattern this rhythmical pattern that they follow and they're very in tune with how the seasons change how the resources change and where they're best suited to be at any time of the year my ancestors elders used to be down the ocean and then you come out up to the mountains to gather acorns and shoot deer and then it got too cold here they went to the desert and then when it got too hot there they came back and went traveling again you know where there was good food mid-water you know they went there this is what we did for thousands of thousands of years mother earth gives us everything we need the food the shelter the the come--as in this area because there's there's different Kumi I groups across San Diego the one specifically in this area would winter down here in the desert and Creek areas you'll get a lot of Mesquite there they'll harvest the beans the normal seasonal migration was the new winter time you're gonna be down here from the desert of course warm in the 70s and 80s and in summertime you go back up to the mountains or you go down to the coast in the springtime that people would go to the ocean and gather mussels and clams the abalone was a big food sustenance down at the coast right by Point Loma that called at McNeese or Blackland and there was a abalone all over all over out there our people were also fishermen too we're people of the ocean of the mountains and of the desert from the coast to El Centro I believe it's like 130 miles and if you've seen that mountain terrain it's all overhead chaparral and you only have a gothic sandals you're carrying everything you own with you at the same time so it's quite a trek and it probably takes at least a couple weeks to do I mean we would go back and forth and trade we would trade no tokuma out from the ocean with the cumbia on the mountain cumbia in the desert we had these trading routes that the Spaniards used later on we're working on figuring out where the main trail systems are we've recorded the trail along this edge but for the most part old highway 80 and the eight took advantage of the old native trails and so there for the most part destroyed now oh yeah with oh yeah highway eight I mean it's the koomer highway there's a reason it's named that you know I don't think a lot of people don't realize that so those rolled walking trails that's just where they having to put the freeway having the commune highway now I mean it acknowledges that no we as the first people you know we've always been here you know the cumbia highway goes through many of the reservations it goes to viejas because of part of quia pie goes to la posta manzanita and campo has more reservations than any other county in the country we are the sukwon band of Cahuilla Indians like manzanita they're a band Campo is a band es is a band but when it comes down to all of us together that's the nation we are the Cooley I nation and you know these are the reservations the cumbia communities that are federally recognized there's a lot of cumbia people who are not federally recognized state they didn't have reservations from what I was told never many more communities of cumbia than are now I mean thousands and thousands 40 50 thousand Kumi I hear you know on both sides of the border the border what it is they cut straight right through community rhetoric I mean coming our territory went north of Oceanside all the way down to about 100 miles east of Ensenada and from the Pacific Ocean all the way into the desert and there were even cumbia bands in Algodones close to Fort Yuma on this side of the international border it's 3 million 700,000 acres of land that the akuma existed on until you know then we get contact you know from European and then things kind of changed all this land was taken away and a lot of our people were pushed out of our traditional lands we were pushed more up into the mountains there were still people that would go down every now and then but it did disrupt a migration cycle before there was anybody to owned any property you lease a room free to go where we wanted to go the ranchers started coming in to Southern California at the beginning of the 1800s when the Pioneers started coming in getting the private property fence it off you couldn't go through there no more we have some accounts of their early years and there's a lot of conflict with the native tribes a couple massacres there's ambushes this goes back and forth from both groups our culture slowly began to die because we couldn't do what we used to do our people haven't been able to you know kind of go out and harvest in over a hundred years out in the deserts and you know since the reservation system was you know at least ours was back in the eighteen eighteen hundred so you know it's everybody's been pushed in the system and we have no longer part of the seasonal migration all this land was was taken away and if you ever read that book pushing to the rocks that's what happened what happened when the ranchers came into all the people from these areas that we know of I moved out to Table Mountain they were shipped out and would have forced to live up there just surviving out here you know we've had a pretty rough it was a tough time for our people but our people are strong and very adaptable and if something changes we can adapt to anything so what you got with the kumbaya and because there's such because they're so innately adapted to the natural environment eighty to ninety percent of the plants out here were used for something they found some kind of use for them whether they ate them whether they use them for medicine or just everyday purposes everything out here has a purpose they'll find something to do with it there's food there's shelter everything you need in life you can find out here it may not look like there's there's a lot out to here to eat but once you learn through culture through what somebody has taught you then you understand what really is there and then there's an abundance of things out there I've heard before people say you know there's no food out of here and everything but there's a lot and I gotta say this my wife cooking class with Martha she was doing at KU Mia Community College she would take her students out and you know out into the hills and they would gather the wild potatoes of miners letters to junk all these different things and they were getting full while they were gathering these things and bringing it back where we're standing it's it's a resource gathering area almost anywhere you go and San Diego is a resource gathering area cuz they used everything what you have right here this is sugar bush the red clusters on top could be the leaves are actually sweet to eat as well the the flowers of the yucca once boiled it tastes almost like artichoke hearts this is a mojave yucca aside from being eaten what they would do is they would peel back these fibers until they had enough that they could sew them together and they would make baskets and they would make carrying cases with the fibers and they're fairly strong and they hold up pretty well and when they dry out they actually get even stronger and they hold for him I know for a fact that it holds pretty well because I've torn my pants out here and sewed him back together with this stuff so they held up pretty well also around September and the mountains there was a harvest of pinyon piñon nuts the pinyon Pines were very important to our people actually this area used to be an ancient pinyon pine forest that burnt down and then dropping down into the desert in the winter time harvesting mesquite beans things like that this is the catskill acacia it's our local variety of mesquite when you get down to the desert and closer to the Colorado River you get the larger mesquite down in that area it's one of the main food sources as you can see these pods on it are still very young but as it matures they grow into kind of string bean long pea pods they would grind them into into kind of a meal and of course there's the desert apricot different times of the year you have the desert Lily and they come out in the springtime like you pull it up it's like a like an onion there's a whole bird this is the jojoba it'll get to be about five or six feet tall the fruits are kind of like an olive size there's not a lot of meat on them but they would grind them up and then we know all along the ridge line and these mountains we have milling areas where remnants of these of the the seeds and the millings can be found we would cut barrel cactus and slice it like pineapple no pineapple slices I don't cut off the stickers we could use those for fishing hooks - that's the holly leaf cherry and in the fall these OSHA's are loaded with red fruit they are kind of like a cherry taste you only eat the outside but you can also grind up the seat and use that as well what they would do is when you open these up there's actually a nut inside of it a small nut inside that would be ground up and eaten or you could you might even be able to eat it straight out of the show tastes like Christmas cookies the aftertaste does chia she was also harvested it's a very good food and it makes uh it's a very good drink also harvesting manzanita berries Tom ooh the cattails it could be eaten too by where the root is it tastes just like cucumber and also with cattails can use to make the thatch in four houses the buckwheat it grows everywhere in chaparral environment what they would do is they would harvest the seeds which are really small so it's a really labor-intensive but they would grind them up and then turn them into flour harvesting agave was also a major food source people really seem to be fond of the agave and we actually have the evidence that shows that they were using it as one of their main staples the Native Americans would harvest the agave and roasted in pits and we have evidence of these old roasting pits so these are the types of things were looking for when we're looking for prehistoric roasting pits for the most part they're excavated very deep so there's not a lot on the surface that we can tell so when we find these it's because they've been washed out or we'll find tailings from small animal burrows the natural soils because of the burning and the constant use will actually turn to almost ash and will blacken you also see in the area there's a lot of fire affected rocks and that show signs of burning I remember when I first walked out there and just saw all the roasting pits and layers and layers of it that you know from thousands of years ago they dated one of the agave pits that I've seen back to 200 AD and to me that's really fascinating because each agave pit was for one family so knowing that that had to have taken many many families and many many years that really gives you a sense of how many people and how much they traveled and we actually have ethnographic resources saying that groups coming from Baja coming from the desert coming from the north would all meet here during early spring months March and April and would gather agave it has been something that has gone dormant for a while most of the people haven't harvested agave in a while and Kempo they did their agave harvest this this past year I would say possibly a hundred years it's been since they've done that agave harvest yeah they Gabby roasts we had in a reservation and has an and nobody has seen that probably definitely not in my generation there's a good experience for the tribal members and people came together you know I mean archaeologists were there and the tribal members were there and other tribes we actually had you know more than one tribe present at the GAVI Rose I think that's what I like a lot about being kunai's that we are like social people and we always do gathering and we like to be around each other in the social communal thing I like it people working together digging up the agave plants and being part of it you know it's kind of like a team effort thing so when it comes time to harvest the agave one of the first things we'll do is dig the pit then what we'll do is we'll get at River rocks and we'll line the bottom with the river rocks then we'll go and get the agave now a gobby that we want is a gobby that has a stalk that's about a foot higher or less if it's a foot or less there's a lot more sugar in inside the agave plant most of the food sources out here in this desert transition area have a very short amount of time where you can harvest them and they're actually edible the agave we have here and once they're at that stage they're not really edible anymore so there's a very small window where they can come and harvest these things that's why certain timekeeping features to let you know where you are in the year we're really valuable so they wouldn't miss out on food sources with the Native Americans have done in this area if they've collected some of the pumice and some of the basalt rocks and they've built Karin's to line up directly with solar events he's Karen's right behind me actually line up directly with the Spring and Autumn Equinox so to Karen's line up with the notch in the ridge side and then as the Sun would come up all three elements would line up directly there's another set of Cairns that lines up with the winter solstice and there's a third set of Karen's that lines up with the middle of March our best guess is that it points towards the agave season when it's when it's ripe is just after the agave comes in to season all the rest of their fruits would come into season - so they would make sure they were here at specific times once we finally is a gobby then we'll get our digging sticks and we'll start prying them up digging stick traditionally it's a piece of oak about half as tall as me and put the end in the fire when it's been fire hardened and it'll take a lot of being especially oak it's a dense wood now for a good agave roast probably want to get about 15 to 20 agaves we'll bring them back to the roasting area and we will light the fire now when the fire is lit it's usually lit by somebody who was born in the summertime the reason for that is because that's the time of our rains or hoping for you know bountiful rains then the oak trees they will have a lot of acorns my great grandfather great grandmother used to depend on those summer rains because they were a lot more consistent than they are nowadays so they just it was it was it likely the monsoonal season so when it takes about six to eight hours for the fire to burn down we'll start cutting the leaves off the agave and we'll leave it looking like a pineapple then we'll soak that in water while she soaked the leaves in water we'll get as much moisture in it as possible - I'll put those agave leaves on top of that holes once we have a good layer then we'll get the Goblet hearts and we'll start putting those on top of that after we've put all that gob of hearts in then we'll get the rest of the leaves and put those on top then we'll make another fire on top of that and then we'll bury the whole thing and what we bury it we'll leave it there for a day or two days then after that we'll dig it up and it's ready it's it's sweet its but it tastes it's a cross between like sweet potato and pineapple nice and sweet young young boy I was able to taste their dog eating some yesterday and down there Campos walked back their memories to know our foods and to be able to harvest our foods I mean it's it's a very important thing to our people why I think it's important for people to see you know about what the GAVI was and how their food for the community people the the agave harvest it brings our people back together I mean it brings that communal spirit when we gather there gobby when we gather the eight coins when we gather cheer when we go and gather opinion we go into the to the ocean and gather the mussels and all these things and it also reaffirms our territory this is our land this is where we came from this is our holy land this is our promised land the songs are saying the beginning of the the bird songs of recycled in honor of the GAVI roast the birdsong is telling a story about the cooing I the way I was told was this whole agape harvest it was a ceremony and it was not just the foot step but of the four wings - tongue [Music] ceremonies are important because they connect us to the past our ceremonies that we do now are basically the same as an ancient time the old people went to unimaginable situations through all of that they still kept some of our ceremonies because they're so important and we keep it going because that's who we are Indian people same goes beginning song so this these saw it is a government rules and all the cultural rules will carry on after the day and be strong and like it used to be those are my words hoping that that's what's the day brings back but now in this country especially here in San Diego County in California most of trying to really get back into their culture they're teaching the younger kids we are what's around us we are the songs we sing we are the today our generation are really now when we bring back our traditional food this is not just bringing back the foods to read but also the story about all this one of the main plants that we use is right here the acorn they sustained our people for thousands of years from what I was told by the elders all these oak trees you know they were planted by quim young people by the different family I've heard it called plant husbandry it's the line between wild and agriculture the hunter-gatherer in talador myth is maybe they kind of I think oversimplified with our people because you are shaping the landscape what some people think of as a wilderness no these were communities here these plants were so important to the people they knew they couldn't just leave it to nature to provide for them they took the acorns they took the pinion pine not implanted the forest oak trees to Native Americans here in San Diego County I would say almost sacred and they were our library says the trees so give you will give you a corns and then you have then you make your shall wheat which is the a coordinate take one - what numbers we're doing right now is just cracking the acre and then she's using a rock with a hole in the middle they usually get the rocks by the ocean to have different holes for different sizes so you just crack it varies you know tough at the time like very slow I didn't break the whole acre harvesting and making sure we is a lot of work it's very labor intensive I helped my stepmother we used to go to the Buddha mountain so we were little guys though we told they put us to work but you gotta beat the squirrels before they get it got this grub you know grab the Acorn we would go as a family we still do that as a family to go harvest you know what the kids and grandchildren it was a great time to be together build your family stronger sin it was a I mean it was a great bonding adventure talk about stories the old times some of the best times of my life we gather in the late fall but around November before the first rains and you're getting you know 15 50 80 pound sacks according in that eat corn up theirs is about like that round they call a posh and that's this tree here they call it now and it's got a different look an acorn yeah they do different kinds when this basket will have different that we have seen y'all go Park this the Black Hawk and fly boat yeah they do taste different the Live Oak now that's also man's Anita's named after al cotton you can see them here they grow out of the rocks that's what they're talking about Chanel cartoon they grow out of the rocks so harvesting is just the start once it dried then they took the show off and then there were still there's a little thin layer around us the Acorn that had a dry tune in a head of a basket they called sowwy and they break it up a little bit and then they take that the wind coming this way and they go like that take that a little thin coat off so when they comes I still have the skin with the wind they would take off all the skin so some pork chop some years it's you may not have such large acorns but you'll have the ability to store them and once they're dried they can be in storage for years you don't get a yearly harvest not every plant will bloom every year that's why they had to supplement so much of their meal with other food the acorns weren't always reliable so the old people when there was good years they gathered a lot put him in their granary to store for maybe when their times was a little tight so they could build these granaries either on bedrock to keep animals from burrowing up from the bottom or they would build these large scaffolds upon which to elevate the granaries above the ground but the ones that were built on scaffolds there's nothing to see anymore the baskets won't survive but the lithics will you have rocks that are shaped a certain way but they're so camouflaged with the environment that the everyday person when they're walking through the years wouldn't notice them so what you have here it's just a very simple granary and then right near it right up on top of the rocks here we have milling so they're right in close proximity to each other in ancient times they would go out to the bedrocks and grind the acorns there on our reservation out at sukwon we have at eyes all over the place you know where the grinding stones of it so you have right here this is what we call a milling slick it's more for a rubbing or grinding than a pounding purpose and they will rub that so much that it'll it'll be smooth for grinding granite is a very very common material for monos ground stone to actually make mortars inside of it's pretty common in San Diego is very important when we're grinding the acres they have to be very dry otherwise they're because they could have a lot of oil on it so it will be very hard to work when it's wet took a long time because yeah I had to be grinded by it you know by hand with my grandmother the yacht was her name's he'd taken crushing overhead like that making that shall we by hand but nowadays they just shell that thing put in that machine and plug it in electric and grind it you don't usually we use a corn grinder now now we have grinding like coffee grinder all this modern life we have we have busy schedules we have to find a way to save time but still keep the tradition still keep eating the traditional foods I'm doing this way it would take ten times more but this is one of the traditional ways we wish to do so now she's making sure all the the a come flowers very fine I don't have big faces on it then once they beat it into flour and then they poured water on that to teach the bitterness out so when they put a water the water is washing all day because you can taste it like that is very bitter water and wash that like that mom all the bitter will go away well mostly I help with the cooking coz the cooking you have to leach it and you like let it sit in this thing for a long time and let it leach out the toxins and that whole time you're sitting over it with like a little handful and you're just pouring like water into your hand and leaching in and it's kind of it takes a lot of time I sat there for like an hour and a half like that one time taste is not that bitter and then you start to cook it in a lawyer wash my talk so you put a little bit of water and they you know you're put in the fire and you boil it for maybe like ten minutes or so would you yeah actually so when when this is cocoa ready and then you put in another container and then you cut it in pieces this is the final product you can see yeah I always have to eat some chewy and I didn't like it when I was younger I spit tell my grandma my grandma was making me I always say you have to eat it a little bit especially I like the candle lighting or a graveyard cleaning they say you should further cuz you're eating for the people in the past so the other quarter tastes almost like poi from white and now I like I like it's or Tia with my dip it in my beans or something in it I think it's good tastes good if you know what it is and if you put what behind the meaning of it all and how you feel about it and how you feel about yourself and your tribe and your people and the struggles they did and it's still here to the point we look at that Trina says that treats there are people [Music] [Music] so you're looking at now what's known now as the Colorado desert used to be the old ancient lake hawea three or four hundred years ago this entire valley almost all the way out to Baja was a freshwater lake you know ancient times this used to be a giant freshwater lake and there's maps that you can see and it showed the footprint lake Cahuilla was over a hundred miles long thirty five miles wide and over three hundred and fifty feet deep it was formed when the Colorado River silted up its bed on the south side where it floated the Gulf of California large floods could cause it to divert its flow north and the entire flow of the river would cascade into the Salton trough which is 250 feet below sea level once the Colorado River could divert back into the Gulf of California it would take approximately 60 years for they like to recede through evaporation lake hawea in the last 1,000 years has filled and receded at least four times and we know that there were many more of these fillings before that time going back thousands of years when you get down there a lot of the sites we find are on a specific elevation line you can see on the along the hillside there some of the lines and along here of course where it used to be where the lake used to be probably the earliest lake hawea shoreline that we know about that is associated with Native Americans is well over 3,000 years old you can almost tell exactly where the shoreline is by where you find the sites because they follow the curve of it and they follow the washes into it it used to be a major fish and shellfish resource for all the people who are living here the Kumi I would come here and they would fish and they would gather shellfish they built fish traps along this is actually called fish creek mountains and these are the fifties are some of the original fish traps when the lake was higher in the be in the in the earlier periods we don't know exactly how these fish traps were used but the hypothesis is that the Native Americans were exploiting the natural spawning behavior of fish that occurred in Lake Hawea they would come into the shallow waters to spawn and lay their eggs in gravelly nests precisely in the kinds of locations where you find fish traps because fish seem to naturally they'll frolic around and rocks and places like that and then they can also be influenced by humans you know you can shoo them into to a place where they'll be trapped the other type of fish traps that occur are alignments of rocks either you or v-shape rocks with the apex of the V always pointing down into the water somewhere like this you can heard the fish in here and you can use an atlatl you can use the spear you can use an arrow when you get them a more shallow area I mean you can then they can only go so far or you can net him the fact that we find these fish traps in neat parallel rows following the wave cut terraces of the shoreline as they recede suggest that many that we see today are from that very last in filling between 1600 and 1700 ad and by 1750 or so the lakes completely dried up because there's no water here it started with the Spanish and people engineered the Colorado River to not fill up this Basin anymore it's a very different landscape since you take the water out of the picture so there's a lot of stuff going on that's have affected how we see it now than how they were seeing in the past like like most transitory people the majority of their food was gathered 1/4 to 1/3 was probably meat products and mostly in this area you got deer you got rabbit once all the men hunted and this was something that we did I mean we we had to get food so every boy when they became a man learned how to make a bow well there's different kinds of wood to make bows some people will make them out of willow or challah see some people will make them out of sin Yahoo oak see or elderberry so the first thing you need to do it as you got a peel peel this so that's what I'm doing now the animals that were hunted with bows were pretty much everything I mean from rabbits to deer and mountain sheep herd in the old days even bear were taken with bows stone tools were originally used to strip and split the stave there's a hard blue stone that lets up by khumba bluish-gray stone could be used to split just hammer right through this is a very very common tool stone that we find throughout San Diego County and archeological assemblages you can sort of see it's a sort of greenish gray material and I've already got a few types of tools over here that represent the the archaeological tool assemblage this tool right here is a chisel tool and it has very interesting wear patterns on it that indicates that one end is being used as a chisel whether the other end is being battered with a hammer when you look at this piece you now see battering damage on one end from hitting it with a hammer stone and then this end has a particular kind of damage on it from using it on the wood so you can look at this then and analyze in the lab and and have an idea of how is being used but nowadays what we use is we'll use what we got anything so what I use is a machete and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hammer do and split so I'm not gonna hammer it here but that's how we would do it we would start splitting it and what we get then is we'll get half this will have it split like this so once we do that what many people will use in the old days would use a stone but now thanks to modern technology we can use a rasp and we'll bring this down until we lose most of this pith and it takes a little while after about about a week of taking it down it comes out to about like this well this is what we have do you see most of it's been taken down now the next thing we need to make is string people have been making string out of plants for probably at least twenty thousand years there's images of women wearing string garments that date back that far this is just an old agave leaf it's actually a little too far gone for good spinning but you can see that the fibers in this leaf would also be able to be used kind of process them down into these these long nice strands so we were showing how to right now is showing how to get cordage out of this what we did was we threw some of the agave leaves in the fire got them toasty and then after that what we do is we we peel peel the skin off now the thing about the the agave if you get it wrong it is caustic it's like acid and it burns but when you put it over the fire it neutralizes that so that's why we're able to handle this so once we got this all cleaned then what we do is with a rock under a gobby has a lot of material that highly value for the thing that we make now the piece of wood the material the threads this is how we make the string for this and I like to make my own string that way I I know what parts are strong what parts are not so she will put together just a little bit of water so be more flexible and then and like a little bit of the thyme the garlic art is very very strong and can be used to make like fishing nets and you know strength for the bow and as we start making this cordage what we're going to need to do real soon as we're going to need to add on when you come near the end of one link length of it you'd have to basically apply it you know or splice it together you know you find the end and then you just can can continue to twist it as you go along and add more pieces to it and make it as long as you need to make so here's a record it's been added on there always one test for strength because you don't want this to break when you're shooting yeah one time I made the complete bow and arrow set just from stone tools and it took off it took a long time and it gave me an appreciation of the elders are people you know who came before had just those things to do you know with so here's the boat ready to go so start showing you on on how to make a like a small little projectile point we won't be able to we won't be finishing it today this will likely break on me before I finish anyways there's there's failure decent failure rates on these kind of things and this might take me an hour so that's why I'll just get it started the stone is difficult to work to begin with these are sort of small pieces and they're just very very easy to fracture and a lot of the materials we do find at archaeology sites look like they they broke during production terms of the actual failure rate I would say at a minimum 30% it might be higher this starting part is is very easy it's it's when I am down here in the middle sections it's more likely to break then and then at the very end where I'm doing the final finishing and I'm retouching the tip that's another place where there's a lot of failure rates and and I can be almost done 95% done I'm working making the trying to make that tip nice and symmetrical and straight you know just snap off I'm grinding the edge a little bit that that strengthens it as I do the pressure flaking and you can kind of get the concept it's like you know I can see this little Arrowhead in here I just need to sort of chip away the outside and release it so this is this is our arrow and we would put a stone tip here when we're hunting for bigger game this could shoot a bird off with a small bird and get that or also for target practice if you notice our goo my arrows are in two parts now this main part right here the main shaft and then the part out of hardwood we'll put it in like like this and the reason why we have the arrow in two parts is because when a person goes hunting and it hits an animal like a deer will pull it out or this will fall out person carries more of these than these maybe carries six of these and about 20 of these that way but makes a shot and picks it up and he can reload after I clean this off then I want to measure it right about here that's about how long I want it so every every person will measure it according to their own length so every person's barely seen it when when people are going hunting everybody will have their own decorations their own Marklin so they they can identify their own arrows so now that we have it you can see it's got a little bit of a bend right here so what we're gonna need to do is we're going to need to straighten it this is an arrow straightener made out of clay so what would happen is we would heat this up in the fire until it's glowing and then we'll get the the wood we'll put some water just put some water on and we'll run it right through and it'll Bend it and once it's bent straight then we'll put it put cold water on it and it'll set that Bend so we'll do that with all the arrows until all of them are straight like this so now that we have this don't we get the hawk feathers hawk or buzzard you gonna know goes back into our creation story so these animals are very sacred when we this is seen you seen you form a deer so this is used to hold the arrows now the glue that we use is a mix of pine pitch or manzanita pitch and ashes so these coals but will do it will grind the coals up into a powder will heat up the pine pitch until it's liquid will pour the coals in there and we'll use that for the glue for our for our arrows so once we have our arrows made and we have our bow then the next thing we want to do is we want to make sure it works so with a bow you know take good care of it and everything want it to be as you know the best possible because when you're out hunting you don't want something to break down especially if let's say you know there's it's a mountain lion or something like this [Music] [Music] [Music] going to the gatherings it's just really fun and you dance in a play pian and it's just like a great time to like get together fiona is a game a traditional Indian game you play that night around a fire and p.m. there's two teams of four and there's a coin me or he's like the referee and you have bones a black bone and a white bone and you hide them in your hands and then they try and guess what hand do you have the black and white bone in [Music] oh well you're trying to guess you're trying to catch as many people as you can and guess what they have in their hands basically and then you give the bones over and when all the bones are given to that side then it's their turn to go you get sticks they're like points there's 15 sticks and the point is to get all 15 sticks on your side and if you get all the points you win but sometimes the game can go back and forth this Tim this Tim caught Leroy got Bobby caught these two this these two over here then I've seen people play and get down to one stick and lose okay all the sticks back and then go the same way back and forth so it goes for a long time one time when I played piano manzanita we started when it got dark and we played all the way until 7:00 in the morning it's always been a real fun thing to do and it's something that we do at our cultural gatherings now like everybody has P own tournaments and one of our elders told us 1932 with the last P own games here at manzanita there's been a lot of work that has gone in from the elders and the tribal leaders to start this Renaissance of the Kumi people we have an opportunity now to move into the future by bringing what's there in the past and let everybody know what it is and how we got here I hold a piece of pottery or like I touched the milling and I get transported and I can see the people milling and I can feel like the people using it and to me it's it's it's that human element somebody sat here 500 years ago and milled this so they could survive in this landscape and it's amazing it's a beautiful place but it's a harsh environment and that's one of the main reasons we do what we do is to preserve that sense of feeling when I grew up in the schools you know it was hard for me to be proud of who I was you know I always sat in the back because it was kind of bear saying reading all these things you know we're savages and and we were living like lesson animals and stuff like that you know now from what I'm learning now it's a beautiful way of life you know the natural ways are are better and using all of the plant or using you know everything from an animal that's the way to honor that and not upset the ecosystem of the of the earth respect for our land respect for the animals the plants the Creator and the past that's a foul nation to our whole culture so this is something that is exciting when I see all of our people come together because our culture was like a nice guy a pot that one Outsiders came it crushed us kya crush the pot and different communities different people had a piece to that problem but now that we're coming back together again and we're putting this pot back together we're putting together what we are our culture where it's significant for the tribes it's also significant and not it's a way that humans interacted with their environment and that's unique and specific to this area and also to the world it's literally the world's history so it's everybody's heritage to be proud of and to try and protect I want to be able to hand this to my children so important you know for people to know who they are and keep that within them because it's good for right here well when I learned to dance the brakes on it and to play Peola and all that when I was probably 10 11 years old I think it made a big difference in who I am because I feel more spiritually connected and because of the culture because of the songs because the meaning and the symbolism behind everything now you could see the young people are excited to get up there and dance and play piona and go to the ceremonies and I'm glad I'm here at this time it's a great time to become young okay just as the Sun rises to begin its journey for the day we to begin the journey of our lives as children there are storms and mountains in the paths they change our rays of light in our colors I come from this dirt in this land and I will return to it one final time until that day comes I was shine as the brightest flames of the Sun those around me will know my connection to this place and all that is life everything that flows in this land has flowed through my blood my eyes my breath in my heart

Channel: Indigenous Americans

Views: 104,553

Rating: 4.9160147 out of 5

Keywords: Native, Natives, Native People, Indigenous People, Indigenous, Native American, First Nation, Amerindian, American Indian, Aboriginal, Native Americans, First Nations, Amerindians, NDN, Indian Country, American Indians, Aboriginals, San Diego, California Indians, California, Tipai, Ipai, Kumeyaay, Kumiai, NDNs, North America, America, Americas, USA, Mexico, Baja California, Turtle Island, Diegueño, Indigena, Indigenas, Tribe, Tribal, Native Indian, Native Tribe, Indian Tribe, Culture, Documentary

Id: Q3w3MQkT9B0

Length: 51min 43sec (3103 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2018