Photos: Salinan Indian violin missing from Mission San Antonio
The Alta California Dance Co. performs at Mission San Antonio, a historic complex 50 miles north of Paso Robles on California’s Central Coast. The mission is where, in 1798, a violin was crafted by Jose Maria Carabajal. For him, the violin -- the Carabajal -- as it came to be known, was an important part of his people, the Salinan Indians. It’s gone now, stolen from an unlocked display case at the mission’s tiny museum seven years ago. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
John Warren conducts the New World Baroque Orchestra, which he founded in 1985, at Mission San Antonio. In the early 1990s, Warren restored the Carabajal (pronounced car-ah-bah-HALL), so when the violin was stolen in August 2003, “it tore my heart apart,” he said. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
Rosemarie Nikolakakis plays the violin with the New World Baroque Orchestra at Mission San Antonio, which sits deep within Ft. Hunter Liggett. One would think that a sprawling Army base would pose a challenge for thieves, but security had been lax when the Carabajal was stolen in 2003. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
John Warren, artistic director of the New World Baroque Orchestra, holds photographs he took of the Carabajal. Over the years before the violin was stolen in 2003, he would remove it from its cabinet and carry it out of the museum for concerts, admiring its workmanship, its grain patterns, its rough-hewn tuning pegs. “It wasn’t glorious, but it was very, very good,” he said. “It wasn’t a Stradivarius. It had a simple little varnish.” (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
John Burch, the spiritual head of the Salinan Nation of San Luis Obispo and Monterey Counties, says that getting the Carabajal back is a matter of tribal pride -- “to show that some Salinan Indian 200 years ago laid aside his tom-tom and said, ‘Look what I can do!’” (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
The audience listens to a performance by the New World Baroque Orchestra in April at Mission San Antonio, the home of the Carabajal until it was stolen in 2003. The heirloom crafted in 1798 made its way through the branches of the Carabajal family tree, and in 1973, Leonard Lane, a Carabajal descendant living in Ventura, thought the violin deserved to be in its original home and donated it to the mission. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
A depiction of the mission orchestra is etched into a wall at Mission San Antonio, where the Carabajal violin, considered priceless to the Salinan Indians, was stolen in 2003. Other artifacts -- Salinan drums, spear points, a huge book of musical notations on sheepskin pages -- were left untouched. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)
