Abstract
Many, probably most, readers of this journal knew this book was in progress and have been eagerly awaiting it. They will not be disappointed. As expected, it is a superb work of scholarship. Jan Timbrook has searched through thousands of notes by the brilliant but eccentric ethnographer John Peabody Harrington; has worked through the specimens he collected and identified; and has correlated all this with more recent work on the Chumash. Harrington was obsessed with recording what he could of dying languages and cultures, and he became especially fascinated with the Chumash. The result is an amazing amount of material on a group that tragically declined (because of disease and hard life during the mission period) from some 25,000 to a tiny handful, losing most of their culture in the process.
The Chumash, as the term is now used, comprise a group of languages formerly spoken in Ventura, Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties, California. (The name “Chumash” comes from one of the island communities.) This language family was possibly in the Hokan phylum, but may well have been an isolate, the last of a very ancient and separate stock. Chumash society reached the “chiefdom level” in Julian Steward's terms, thus making it unusual among nonagricultural peoples. The Chumash had sophisticated plank canoes, spectacular art, rich folklore and religion, a structured society with hereditary rank and with many specialists, and much else. Like the Northwest Coast peoples, they disprove the old idea that “hunter-gatherer” cultures were necessarily simple. Thus, they have been of great interest to anthropologists. What we know of them is largely derived either from archaeology or from the work of Harrington as refracted through scholarship by Timbrook, Thomas Blackburn, the late Travis Hudson, and a few other indefatigable scholars.
The Chumash must have used hundreds of plant species, most of which were lost to history long ago. At least the major ones have been documented—almost 200 species, including acorns, sage seeds, wild cherry pits, and many seeds and greens for food; Apocynum, nettles, and barks for fiber; redwood driftwood, pine, and elderberry for wood; and many medicinal herbs.
Timbrook's botany, as well as her coverage of ethnographic literature, is thorough and up-to-date. The book has lovely illustrations, most of them watercolors by Chris Chapman. I noted no errors of consequence, hardly even a typo. Readers might be warned that the Spanish names of plants herein are not standard Spanish but old-time Californian Spanish as recorded by Harrington. This Spanish was full of California Native words, and also of Nahuatlisms pronounced with a California accent. There were also nonstandard uses of regular Spanish words. Timbrook notes this in some cases—especially the Californian use of aliso to mean “sycamore” as well as, or instead of, “alder” (the standard Spanish meaning).
This book is strictly an ethnobotany. It has utilitarian, medicinal, ceremonial, and mythic lore of all sorts, including many good Coyote stories. (Shnilemun, the Great Coyote in the Sky, was the most sympathetic or at least the most complex Chumash mythic figure.) It does not go into special detail on other related matters, such as the question of vegetation management, covered in several other works (by Timbrook and others; see esp. K. Anderson 2005) cited in the bibliography. One useful work not cited is Alan Brown's new translation and study of Fray Juan Crespí's journals (2001). Crespí, an excellent and ecologically sophisticated 18th-century observer, was particularly thorough in his descriptions of Chumash country. He found it all bare from recent burning or covered with grass and “pasturage” (grass-forb mixes). Much of the area he traversed is now chaparral and coastal sage scrub. The rest is farmland or introduced-weed territory. We must rely on Crespí for some sense of the Chumash world.
This book adds to an already significant literature on southern California ethnobotany (e.g. Bean and Saubel 1972; Zigmond 1981) and, more widely, on California, the southwest, and northwestern Mexico. Most of the major groups in this area have now sustained some type of ethnobotanical research. The time is at hand to do some serious comparative work.
This book reminds us of the incredible importance and value of documenting cultural traditions that are in danger of disappearing. These days, the tendency is to dismiss such activity as “salvage ethnography” and to say either that the knowledge is not really disappearing or that it might as well disappear because its time is over—it is no use to anyone. Books like the present work remind us that Harrington, and his contemporaries like Franz Boas, were right: these cultures really are disappearing—tragically—and they are great and brilliant creations of the human spirit. Letting them die unrecorded is equivalent to burning Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson and John Donne because Elizabethan England's “time has passed.” Saddest and most heartrending is that countless indigenous traditions are dying out today, often through outright genocide, more often through neglect, but current anthropological attitudes discourage documenting them. Today, many Chumash are trying to reclaim their old culture, using Harrington's notes and the few other available sources. This ethnobotany will help them greatly in the effort.
Moreover, we cannot possibly understand the California landscape without taking Native American agency into account. Recent work has shown that the indigenous people profoundly affected the landscape in countless ways over at least 12,000 years (K. Anderson 2005; Kay and Simmons 2002). This is long enough to have shaped the evolution of many species (especially annual plants). Without good ethnography, we would be clueless about the realities of post-Pleistocene California, and thus about how to manage vegetation for conservation today. On a worldwide scale, this becomes ever more critical. World ecosystems are collapsing, and for most areas we have little or no documentation of how traditional peoples maintained them and managed them. Far from dropping the “salvage ethnography” agenda, we should be funding it at the highest priority level, worldwide.
One can still see the remote inner mountains of the Chumash world more or less as the Chumash elders saw them. Amazingly, almost within sight of Los Angeles and Santa Barbara are wilderness areas so remote that even intrepid hikers do not go there. One area, a savagely beautiful land of flame-red and snow-white cliffs covered with thin pinyon and liveoak woodland, is the Chumash Wilderness. Fire suppression has been so difficult that these areas are not as damaged by it as other mountains of California. But one must visit them soon. Global warming is causing huge fires from which the native vegetation cannot regrow. Every year tens of thousands of acres succumb to the spread of introduced European weeds that tolerate heat, drought, and air pollution better than the natives.
For many reasons, we should be thankful to Jan Timbrook for this labor of love. Thanks also to Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and to Heyday Books—stalwart workers with California Native peoples in many good causes—for doing a beautiful job of presentation.