Native Americans Resurrect Heritage

He lived most of his life in the city of San Fernando, in the shadow of the mission that his grandfather had called home. Five generations of his family--hailing from ancient American Indian tribes--were born or died behind mission walls.

But Rudy Ortega--like many Native Americans of his era--grew up oblivious to the American Indian blood running through his veins. In his family, “we were brought up as Mexicans, we spoke Spanish at home,” said Ortega, 70. “Maybe they were ashamed.

“Or maybe they were just afraid, after all they went through.”

What they went through--the thousands of Native Americans who lived at San Fernando Mission--gave birth to the San Fernando Valley, but left their native culture in tatters, their people adrift, and a legacy of shame and confusion that is only now giving way to pride and a revival of American Indian ways.

Today, 200 years after the mission’s founding, the celebration of all things Indian is in full bloom, both within the Native American community and beyond. Genealogists report a boom among people searching their family trees for American Indian roots, and stores do brisk business peddling accessories--from sage-scented candles to medicine bags--linked to Indian lore.

The local Native American community has shored up its identity as well. There are now almost a dozen groups in the Valley and Ventura County promoting American Indian culture through a variety of educational, political and social events.

Their powwows--intertribal celebrations held almost every weekend during the spring and summer--draw hundreds of American Indians and others who celebrate native culture through traditional dances, stories and food. There, young Indian children practice the rituals of their ancestors, and in the process, keep alive a culture that extends back thousands of years.

Still, the enduring legacy of the missions for Southern California’s Native Americans is a particularly bitter one. Unlike tribes consigned to reservations that passed their traditions from generation to generation, the missions’ American Indians have been forced to try to resurrect a culture buried by years of allegiance to the customs of Catholicism and Spain.

“Other tribes across the country were able to preserve a lot of their beliefs, a lot of their language. But our people were scattered,” explains Paul Varela, a Chumash who lives and works on the grounds of a Chumash cultural center in Thousand Oaks.

When the mission era ended, “they told the [American Indian] people to assimilate,” he said, “and so they vanished. And that gave the illusion that there were no [native] people left.”

Varela, 41, used mission records to trace his ancestry back 10 generations--”100 years before California became a state”--to the Chumash villages that once dotted the southern California coast.

An Oxnard computer technician, Varela began working with Ventura County officials eight years ago to plan the $1.7-million Chumash Interpretive Center, a county-funded museum built on the site of an ancient Chumash village in Oakbrook Regional Park.

Today, he lives with his wife and teenage son in a small apartment at the center, running its educational programs and assisting the 430-member Oakbrook Chumash Nation, which considers the center its social and cultural home.

The group--which includes more than 300 descendants of San Fernando Mission American Indians--is among several Southern California groups petitioning the federal government for official tribal recognition, a status that conveys educational, medical and financial benefits to American Indian tribes that can document their history and demonstrate that their political and cultural institutions have continued to exist through the years.

That burden of proof is so high that fewer than a dozen tribes have been granted federal recognition across the country in the past 20 years. And it is especially difficult for California’s native tribes, whose land was seized and whose tribal governments were wiped out when they were consigned to the missions more than 200 years ago.

Historians estimate that there were 300,000 Native Americans in California when explorers claimed the land for Spain in the 1700s and set out to colonize its natives and convert them to Catholicism.

The San Fernando Mission was the 17th of 21 built, and the 120,000 acres it controlled was home to half a dozen separate American Indian tribes, spread throughout hundreds of small villages and communities.

To populate the mission, the Chumash were lured from villages in the Santa Monica mountains, the Simi Hills and along the Malibu coast; the Tongva and Tataviam from the San Fernando and Antelope valleys; and the Kitanemuk, Cahuilla and Serrano tribes, scattered from the Tehachapi Mountains to the Mojave Desert.

Those far-flung tribes were completely unrelated, with different languages, traditions, religious customs and political structures. But the mission “became a melting pot for the different Indian communities,” said Santa Barbara Natural History Museum curator John Johnson, who has studied the history of California’s Chumash and Tataviam.

“This was a whole process that occurred all over California during the mission period,” Johnson said. “People who had been separate cultures were amalgamated” as the Spanish friars combined disparate Native American groups and set about undoing their native ways.

Baptized Catholic and given new Spanish names, they were forbidden from following their own spiritual laws. They were taught to speak Spanish, but lost their own languages. They learned new skills, like forging metal and herding cattle, but forgot how to live off the land.

Those who fled the mission were hunted down as fugitives, captured and flogged. Of those who stayed, thousands perished from diseases borne by the Europeans--measles, influenza, dysentery, tuberculosis, syphilis--to which they had no immunity. Of the unknown number of Native Americans who passed through the San Fernando Mission’s adobe walls, more than 2,500 were buried in its cemetery between 1797 and 1852.

When the mission period ended in the mid-1800s, the Native Americans were turned out with little left of their native culture and or the villages they had left behind.

Some went north and settled on what had become the first American Indian reservation in California, at the Tejon Ranch just south of Bakersfield. A few were granted parcels of land, including the 4,000-acre Rancho El Encino along what is now Ventura Boulevard. But most were forced to seek work on mission-owned land or the surrounding ranchos, farms and vineyards owned by settlers from Spain and Mexico.

And although the mission years were hard on California’s Native Americans--twice as many died at the missions as were born, according to the Spaniards’ own records--the period after closure of the missions was little better.

Not unlike freed slaves in the American South, the American Indians left captivity without the skills, land or legal protection they needed to survive in post-mission California.

Expanding settlements reduced the natural resources available to them, making the Native Americans vulnerable to famine and drought. Disease and alcoholism took their toll, and harsh laws making drunken American Indians work off their sentences condemned many to years of virtual slavery on local plantations.

Gradually, over the next hundred years, the Valley’s Native Americans were absorbed--largely through intermarriage--into the Mexican community that surrounded them.

Some, like Ortega’s father, disavowed their American Indian heritage and adopted the lives the Spaniards had bequeathed them. Others held fast to their native roots and continued to practice what little they could recall of their ancestors’ customs.

Most kept a low profile, aware of the disdain with which American Indians were viewed.

“You have to remember,” said Varela, “that as recently as the late 1800s, in my great-grandfather’s time, [settlers] would get off the train at San Fernando and just shoot Indians to take their property.”

The stigma of being Indian weighed heavily on him as a boy growing up in Oxnard, Varela said.

He recalls the “strange feeling” of sitting in class, listening to teachers breeze through lessons on California history. “There was always one paragraph on California Indians, saying ‘There were mission Indians here once and now they’re all gone.’

“I’d go home and ask my grandfather about that, and he’d just dismiss it and say ‘They don’t know what they’re talking about.’ But if I tried to bring it up in school, they’d ignore me. So I just kind of kept to myself. You segregate yourself from the other kids and just stay close to your family.”

His distant cousin, Beverly Salazar Folkes, remembers the mild taunts of children who’d clap their hands over their mouths and go “woo-woo-woo” when they passed her in the schoolyard. Her family was known as “the Indian family” in its San Fernando neighborhood, but overt prejudice was rare, she said.

Unlike many urban Indians, Folkes grew up steeped in the lore of her Native American ancestors. Today, she works with local museums and school groups to share her family’s history. Her maternal grandfather was raised at the mission, and her mother passed down to Folkes and her five siblings not just valuable mission records, but also an oral history and the traditions of their Chumash ancestors.

“I can remember as a child she was always out gathering herbs to make her special teas,” said Folkes, now a Thousand Oaks mother of six grown children.

With her smooth brown skin, high cheekbones and thick black hair, Folkes looks the part in the fringed leather dresses and abalone shells she dons for museum tours or school visits.

Her home is decorated with Native America artifacts--a tomahawk, pipe and a turtle’s shell hang from one wall; pottery, shells and dried herbs line the shelves. The smell of burning sage fills the air, and on her couch lies a half-finished “dream-catcher,” an Indian totem of feathers, wood and rope that she is making.

Like many who have lived quietly close to their native roots, Folkes has been surprised by the growing mainstream popularity of Native American culture.

“I remember thinking it’s finally good that Native Americans are getting some recognition,” she said. “But I never thought there would be a day when it would be the thing to be. . . . It was just a way of life for us, but now it seems there are a lot of wannabes out there.”

Within local native groups, there is some discomfort over the growing popularity of such titles. Some fear they play to misperceptions and stereotypes, and are merely an attempt to capitalize on American Indian kitsch. Others dismiss them as simply irrelevant to the lives of modern urban American Indians.

But Ortega contends that such titles help foster pride and kinship among urban Native Americans who lack tangible ties to their ancestral tribes.

For more than 30 years, Ortega--who goes by the name of Chief Little Bear--has donned a headdress and American Indian garb and led community parades and hosted civic functions, as head of the local Tataviam tribe. These days, he is often accompanied by his 22-year-old son, Rudy Jr.--or Standing Bear, the tribe’s aspiring “spiritual leader.”

As chief, Ortega Sr. heads the council of elders for the Valley’s Tataviam tribe, which arranges help for needy Native American families and sponsors holiday parties and toy giveaways at Christmas and Easter.

And like most local Indian groups, they often provide advice and resources for people trying to identify or substantiate their Native American roots.

Because the missions kept detailed records on births, deaths and baptisms inside their walls, many American Indian descendants have been able to trace their lineage back to specific families and tribes.

But others, whose ancestors do not appear in mission ledgers, have rebelled against the process of proving their ancestry, dismissing reliance on mission records as just another way to subject Native Americans to the white man’s control.

That has led to open sniping among some in the Native American community over the credentials and motives of some who have positioned themselves as leaders.

“There are people out there who aren’t what they claim to be and that’s pretty upsetting to us,” said Varela. “It feels like they’re stealing our heritage.”

State law requires that development in areas of potential historical significance be overseen by a “most likely ancestor”--a representative of the tribe most likely to have lived in the area. The job of that overseer is to protect American Indian artifacts unearthed during construction and to advise officials on their significance and on how best to preserve them.

The positions pay up to $200 a day, a coveted income stream for Valley- and Ventura-area Native American groups, which aggressively compete for monitoring contracts.

Some worry that these kinds of financial and political feuds may mushroom into a more complicated and emotionally charged dispute over the essential question: What makes an American Indian in modern times, and who can and should lay claim to a tribe?

California census figures show a jump in the number of people claiming Native American ancestry in the last 20 years, which may reflect both a burgeoning interest in genealogical research and a growing New Age attraction that makes such identity an attractive claim.

Among the Chumash alone, census figures show a 120% increase in population from 1980 to 1990--an increase that anthropologists attribute more to changing attitudes than changing populations.

Because census figures rely on self-identification, the 10-year jump from 1,458 to 3,208 in Los Angeles and Ventura counties may result from people claiming Chumash ancestry in the absence of any proof. Others may have just discovered their Chumash heritage. Johnson, of the Santa Barbara museum, said he gets several requests each week from people interested in tracing their American Indian roots.

Virtually all the area’s native descendants have mixed ancestry because of tribal mixing at the mission, Johnson said. For example, Ortega and Folkes are first cousins--his father and her mother were siblings--but Folkes identifies with the Chumash side of her heritage, and Ortega with the Tataviam line.

And as more of today’s American Indians marry outside their ethnic group, the lines separating them from others become more blurred.

Varela’s wife is Irish American; their son Paul has red hair and freckles. Folkes’ husband is of Irish heritage as well, and none of her six children has married a Native American. The grandchildren’s pictures that line her shelves reflect the new Native American identity--one defined not by high cheekbones and long braids, but by kinship and shared culture.

“It’s not what you look like, it’s who you are,” Folkes said. “It’s important that our children know who they are, who they came from.”

On Thursday, a look at the future of the San Fernando Valley on the occasion of its 200th anniversary.