Chumash to Suggest Name for Wilderness : Indians: An estimated 200 tribe members will vote tonight. Organizers say the meeting might help foster more self-awareness and unity.

In what is predicted to be the tribe’s largest gathering in memory, the Chumash Indians are scheduled to meet tonight to recommend a Chumash name for a proposed national wilderness area in northern Ventura County.

“I don’t think there’s been a gathering like this ever,” said Patrick Tumamait of Ojai, a Chumash who helped organize the meeting. He said 250 flyers have been sent to Chumash Indians and to people and organizations active in other tribes, and he said more than 200 members of the tribe are expected to attend.

The wilderness proposal is stalled in Congress, so a decision on what to name the area may be of little consequence. But Tumamait and others active in Indian affairs say that just having such a meeting may foster more self-awareness and unity among the Chumash people.

“This is what we are trying to do,” said Connie Diaz of Oxnard, who said she has spread the word about the meeting to fellow Chumash. “We should all band together.

“But it’s hard to get a lot of Indian people out, really,” she added. “Years ago, many people who were Indian didn’t want to be Indian. They wanted to be Mexican or whatever other nationality they were mixed with. So much had happened to the Indian people.”

An estimated 15,000 to 25,000 Chumash inhabited Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties as far inland as Bakersfield when Spanish explorers arrived in the 18th Century. European diseases decimated the Chumash, and many who survived were forced to abandon their culture.

Today, about 200 Chumash live on a reservation in Santa Ynez, about 20 miles north of Santa Barbara, and an estimated 3,000 others of Chumash descent are scattered throughout Southern California, about 1,000 in Ventura County. Several Chumash from the reservation plan to attend the meeting Sunday, according to Tony Romero, a Chumash spokesman there.

Tumamait and others involved in Indian affairs say the Chumash are not organized, and, until recently, most people thought of them only when a developer uncovered a Chumash burial site.

“The Chumash as a live culture have only gotten attention in the past few years,” Tumamait said. Sunday’s meeting “would add to that,” he said.

Bruce Stenslie, deputy director of the Candelaria American Indian Council, an Oxnard-based agency that operates a number of Indian programs, sees another benefit to the meeting.

“What’s nice about this is, it should be an opportunity for the Chumash to rally around something that’s not divisive, not controversial,” Stenslie said.

Disputes have arisen over the use of Chumash Indians as monitors when developers or government contractors disturb Chumash archeological sites. The monitors, who earn as much as $20 an hour, are supposed to make sure that human remains, among other things, are handled properly.

Some Chumash have charged that non-Indians who claim to be Chumash have received many of the lucrative jobs, that even many Chumash monitors are untrained, and that monitors occasionally have let developers cut corners at sacred sites.

At Sunday’s meeting, anyone who claims to be a Chumash will be allowed to vote, said Robert Peterson, an organizer of the meeting who also is a director of the Ventura-based Native American Indian Inter-Tribal Assn.

Only Chumash will vote on the proposed names, Tumamait and Peterson said, but members of any tribe, and even non-Indians, are welcome at the meeting, which is scheduled to start at 6:30 p.m. at the inter-tribal association’s headquarters at Washington School, 96 South MacMillan Ave.

Tumamait and Peterson helped set up the meeting after the Sierra Club asked for a Chumash recommendation on what to call the proposed wilderness area. Under legislation that has passed the House of Representatives and is pending in the Senate, a 378,000-acre expanse of the Los Padres National Forest would be protected as a wilderness area.

Sally M. Reid, a national director of the Sierra Club, said the environmental group wanted a Chumash name because the Hispanic name now proposed--the San Aemigdio Mesa Wilderness Area, after a prominent topographical feature--seemed inappropriate.

“This is a very important area to the Chumash Indians,” Reid said.

Tumamait agreed. “There are burial sites, village sites, lots of rock paintings in the area,” he said.

Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura), who sponsored the wilderness bill, told Reid to make sure that the Chumash were involved in selecting a name. Reid met with Tumamait and other Chumash leaders in early March, and Tumamait volunteered to come back Sunday with possible names.

He said suggestions came from his father, Vincent Tumamait, a respected Chumash elder who is active in education programs about the tribe and has one of the few reference works that list some Chumash words and their meanings.

Patrick Tumamait said four names will be put to a vote on Sunday:

* Chumash Wilderness Area: Chumash means “island people,” and the term reflects the fact that some members of the tribe were found on the Channel Islands. Patrick Tumamait said one drawback to that name is that the wilderness is inland, and nowhere near the islands. But he favors that name because it would increase the tribe’s visibility.

* Kasi-Wey Wilderness Area. Kasi-wey means “the pass” in Chumash, and that name would recognize the migration of Chumash through the mountains as they settled the coastal area, Tumamait said.

* Kaspot-Kaslo (Eagle’s Nest) Wilderness Area.

* Wit Wilderness Area. Wit means “condor” in Chumash, and Tumamait said his father prefers that name because condors once soared over the area.

Lagomarsino said he does not expect any difficulty getting Congress to approve whatever name the Chumash select. The problem, he said, is getting a wilderness bill passed at all.

The House has approved his bill, but it is stalled in the Senate, where Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., has introduced a rival measure. Although Cranston’s bill also would create a new wilderness area, it would provide more protection to Sespe Creek and would restrict the use of private land. That fact has drawn opposition from Lagomarsino and others.

“I wish I were optimistic,” Lagomarsino said.