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Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol 7., No 1, 2018, pp. 40-58

ã C. Sepulveda. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unimported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.

Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility Charles Sepulveda University of Utah Abstract This essay evaluates the conditions of the desecrated Santa Ana River in southern California, historicizes its destruction, assesses what is being done to clean it up, and provides tradition as theory to offer an approach to a solution that re-centers a Native view of land. The essay provides a tribal specific, Acjachemen and Tongva, understanding of lands and waters in contradiction to the Western dynamic of submission central to the dual logic of heteropatriarchy and environmental dispossession. It also provides a historical analysis of the monjerio and traces the colonial logic of domesticating Native women. The Santa Ana River is the largest riparian ecosystem in southern California. The river has been domesticated and desecrated through channelizing and entombing sections in concrete. This essay theorizes that the Western understanding of nature separated from humans produced the heteropatriarchal system the Spanish brought with them to California. This structure was meant to naturalize patriarchy and have Indians submit to the nuclear family arrangement. These logics continue into the present, in contrast to Indigenous traditional ways of life that accepted plural partnerships, and various sexual orientations. It also attempted to disconnect California Mission Indians from their creation stories and the sacredness of water. Kuuyam, the Tongva word for guests, is offered as a decolonial possibility based on culture and tradition in which settler relations to land can be reformed and settler colonialism can eventually be abolished. Keywords: Kuuyam, monjerio, decolonization, peoplehood, heteropatriarchy, environment

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Introduction

What does it mean when human-beings have relationships to places and waters that are currently no longer viable for a sustainable way of life? What do these relationships mean when Indigenous knowledges have been besieged by colonialism? Do these relationships dry up during drought and overflow during floods? Or do they persist beyond both famine and deluge, where the power of the earth is unrestricted by time? Winona LaDuke (2016) recently asked, “How do we grieve for the death of a river?” – an important question guiding my research. However, I do not want to continue mourning for the Santa Ana River; I want to bring her back to life and decolonize our sacred waters. The Santa Ana River is the largest riparian ecosystem in southern California.1 However, it has been severely impacted by settlement to the point of no longer existing as a living river. What had previously been a perennial river before the arrival of settlers is now ephemeral and the water within its banks during the summer is primarily runoff from sewage treatment and irrigation (Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology, 2007). Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred (2009) argued that “colonialism is best conceptualized as an irresistible outcome of a multigenerational and multifaceted process of forced dispossession and attempted acculturation—a disconnection from land, culture, and community…” (p. 52). Colonialism also anchors the colonizing populations to land, and through their settlement they invariably redraw and reconfigure Native relations to land/water. This essay traces both of these colonial processes through the history of systematic domestication forced on both Native peoples and their lands/waters. It also offers an alternative model meant to assist in the re-establishment of human-beings’ organic relationships to land.2

The questions I begin this essay with ask the reader to think through the deeply felt impacts of cultural genocide, land dispossession and environmental destruction: what does it mean to be rooted to a place you have been dispossessed of? Rather than provide a precise answer, I will encourage the reader to envision a decolonized future in which we are no longer the dispossessed.3 In order to provide a deeper representation of decolonial possibilities I will also offer a theorization of critically reformed relations between settlers and Indigenous space – as a step toward an abolition of settler colonialism.

The following essay provides research comparing the American development in southern California and its devastating impacts to the environment with that of the Spanish mission system vis-à-vis the logic of domestication and submission. Specifically, I argue that the monjerio, the all-woman dormitory functioning as prison, was institutionalized in order to enforce domestication through heteropatriarchy as a central tenet of Spanish imperial domination of its expanding empire. I also contend that the destruction of the Santa Ana River by the Americans is tethered to Spanish colonialism and both nations’ western conceptions of civilization. Moreover, Native peoples continue to be subjected to the logics of white supremacy, capitalism, United States liberal domestication policies, and attempts to force them and their 1 Several authors including Don Meadows provide the Tongva name Wanawna for the Santa Ana River. According to Kroeber (1908), the Serrano called the Santa Ana River near Highland, Kotainat (Qotainat). 2 Explained by Tom Holm, Vine Deloria Jr. and many other Native scholars, organic relationships to land are living relationships in which human groups hold their lands in special esteem and view their homelands as sacred. 3 I use the term dispossessed to establish that the Tongva and Acjachemen no longer have possession of our lands. We have limited ability to make or influence decisions of how our lands are used. This is not meant to suggest that the people have been dispossessed completely of our relationship to place.

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lands/waters into submission to assist the expansion, growth and persistence of empire in the eastern Pacific. I argue that both sexual and gender violence (within the monjerio) and environmental degradation (of the river) are inextricable from colonialism. Within a Western episteme, these two are intimately related and inseparable. This inseparability is displayed in this article through what I have named a logic of domestication and submission. Stated differently, both the land and people in southern California have been subjected to a logic of domestication in order for colonization to both anchor the colonizer to place and dispossess the Native of their lands and ways of life. The changes enforced by the colonizer to both people and land/water was and continues to be non-consensual.

As a decolonial method, this article evaluates the conditions of the desecrated Santa Ana River, historicizes her destruction, and provides tradition as theory to offer a route towards a solution that re-centers a Native view of land.4 As a problem/solution focused article, it is in the conclusion where I introduce the concept of Kuuyam, the Tongva word for guests, as a potential theorization assisting in the decolonization of place. Kuuyam is an Indigenous theorization that disrupts the dialectic between Native and settler through a Tongva understanding of non-natives as potential guests of the tribal people, and more importantly – of the land itself.5 Kuuyam also disrupts the view of land and people as domesticable and instead understands place to be sacred and as having life beyond human interests. Contradicting Worldviews and the Inextricable Violences of Colonialism In my experience there are few people who know the name of southern California’s largest riparian ecosystem.6 Furthermore, there are fewer who know the significance the Santa Ana River has for the several tribes that have lived within its environmental zone since time- immemorial.7 The people from these tribal nations, although forever changed due to colonialism, continue to understand that their lands and waters are special gifts provided by the power of nature giving them spiritual strength, sustenance, purpose and life (McGregor & Aluli, n.d.). Even if this connection is severed, the power of the land itself remains and the living relationships can be renewed. Moreover, their identities as indigenous are meaningfully related to the land and the river. This connection is analogous to an umbilical bond; what is put into her body is also ingested and fed on by us (McGregor & Aluli, n.d.). Stated differently, Indigenous peoples’ beings (their ontologies) are inseparably attached to the earth and are affected by the

4 Don Meadows in his 1966 study Historic Place Names in Orange County provides Wanawna as the name of the Santa Ana River. 5 Throughout I will use “land” to denote both land and water. I will also use “land and water” or “land/water” interchangeably. Land is affected by water and water is affected by land – they are interconnected. 6 As a Teaching Assistant for courses in Ethnic Studies at UC Riverside I asked my students if they knew the name of the river that Riverside was river side to. The vast majority, over a thousand students, could not provide a name of the river. 7 These tribes include the Acjachemen, Tongva, Serrano, Cahuilla and Luiseño. This article focuses on the Acjachemen (Juaneño Band of Mission Indians) and the Tongva (Gabrieliño Band of Mission Indians) – both of whom historically and contemporarily live on lands adjacent to the river and have a shared territory near the Santa Ana.

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health of their land and water. The inability of non-Indian contemporary residents of southern California to identify a major waterway or understand its significance is telling of not only the loss of an important ecosystem with impacts to the diversity of plants and animals, but also of a much larger human disconnectedness from the earth. Due to this detachment and simultaneous environmental degradation, it has become increasingly important that our environments are protected and conserved for the benefit of all life. Correspondingly, humans have a dire need to renew, or continue, their distinctive sustainable connections to the earth in order to survive into the future. The above stated inability of humans to identify with their environments is inextricably connected to their failure to understand California colonial histories – which they have been inculcated into believing a romanticized Spanish imaginary in which the mission system and the Catholic priests, including Saint Junípero Serra, are viewed as benevolent and caring for their Indian children (Sepulveda, 2016). Similarly, they view the changes to the land as also benign rather than destructive when such domestications assist in the establishment of what they find desirable or beneficial.

During my first visit to the river a few years ago with my dad and Auntie Irene, to the land he had grown up on, the Santa Ana contained the worst smelling water I have ever been close enough to smell.8 I can imagine the interior of the monjerio must have had a similar stench. Instead of flowing, it sat in stagnant pools of brackish water of a deep green almost black in color, potentially as part of a groundwater recharge program. The health of the river has been unmistakably impacted by domestication.

My dad had grown up on a ranch next to the river less than a mile downstream from the Prado Dam, near Green River Road and CA-91, during a time when the water was still fresh and flowed toward the ocean, naturally recharging the groundwater. Despite the impacts the river had already sustained, the stories both he and my grandparents would tell of living next to the river prior to the 1960s were always of a clean beautiful waterway in stark contrast to the foul water we encountered on our recent visit. One memorable story my grandmother would tell is of my dad as a boy playing with his dog in the river. My dad couldn’t swim, but his dog wouldn’t allow him to get away without swimming; the dog jumped on top of him and dunked him under the water holding him down. My grandmother always enjoyed telling that story. At the time, the water was clean enough for children to play in and to drink – they believed. The ranch that my grandmother had inherited was a section of the 1834 Yorba land grant Rancho Cañón de Santa Ana. Her land currently includes a housing development, and where their home was located is now part of the California State Park system. Although I felt the spirits of my ancestors by being on the land with my family, my challenging attempt to see it through their memories affected my resolve to decolonize our sacred waters and revitalize its environment.

There are several threatened, endangered and extinct species within the Santa Ana River ecosystem. Amongst these is the Santa Ana River Wooly-star, with its bright blue, funnel-shaped flowers. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, “Historical occurrences of Santa Ana River woolly-star are known from Orange County, but it has been extirpated from those locations” (California Department of Fish and Wildlife, 2015). It is reported that there are only 18 of these plants remaining, mostly in San Bernardino County (California Department of

8 I have lived in the region of the Santa Ana River watershed for the majority of my life but had never experienced being next to the river, nor had I been on the land that my father had grown up on. Prior to the visit with my dad and Irene I had gone alone and found that the land was part of the California State Park through an attempt to trespass on our land in order to see it for myself. After my surprise that it was accessible I brought my family back to see it through their memories.

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Fish and Wildlife, 2015). Many plants in the Santa Ana River watershed are and were used as food, for medicine, or for ceremonial purposes by California Indians. Destruction to the environment also comprises an inability to continue using certain plants, and additionally it has a gendered affect. Tribes often have a lack of access to plants unaffected by chemicals, pesticides and other pollutants. Women, who are the primary basket makers in southern California tribal communities, gather and use rhizomatous wetland plants such as juncus textilis. One method of producing basketry material is to split the rehydrated reed. For centuries women have been putting the reed in their mouths when splitting them. Indian women basket weavers using this method are therefore at a high degree of risk if the plants have been exposed to pollutants and pesticides. Another problem tribal members routinely face is inadequate access to gathering locations. They often have to apply for permits to enter their own traditional lands. This expressly affects tribes such as the Acjachemen and Tongva who do not have federal recognition.

Extinct animals within the Santa Ana River watershed include the southern California kit fox, the California grizzly bear, which is on the state flag, and the gray wolf. Prior to colonization, California was full of grizzly bears (ursus arctos californicus), but they were hunted to extinction, often for sport. They were centerpieces of the rodeo during both Spanish and Mexican colonialism. They were lassoed and lanced as a sport showcasing man’s dominance over the wild. The bear, unable to be domesticated for human purposes was seen as a threat to the rancho’s cattle herds and their profit margins. Americans similarly found the grizzly to be a threat to their capitalist growth and continued the Spanish and Mexican colonial legacy of killing them to the point of extinction. This logic of dominating the earth was explicitly used against both the environment and the Indians – either to be exterminated or domesticated to extend the American project rooted in white supremacy, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. In contrast, southern California Indians largely did not hunt bears, instead they treated them with respect as an elder sibling. The above incomplete list of threatened, endangered, and extinct animals and plants demonstrates that all living things are affected by the logic of domestication and submission. These logics have literally besieged Native peoples in southern California and subsist into the present despite their actual unsustainability in glaring contradiction to Native worldviews and creation stories from which the sacredness of life is recognized in the environment.

In a Native spiritual perception of reality human beings have a sacred responsibility to the earth. Acjachemen creation stories tell of two beings: one above, one below, one in darkness and one in light – male and female – inseparable.9 These two created the earth and sand, rocks, trees, and the first people, the Kaamalam (Boscana, 1846).10 Acjachemen know the earth to be female, she fed the people and nurtured them; this is why they know her as female, as mother, and why they have a responsibility to protect her – not out of patriarchy, but out of responsibility as a reciprocal relationship.

9 There are variations of both Acjachemen and Tongva creation stories. Some of these differences are based on geographical differences between where the people lived who told the stories and how they related to them. The Acjachemen and Tongva creation stories share many cultural elements; these elements are also shared with other tribes in southern California. Here I am providing an Acjachemen version as I am more familiar with this version than I am other versions, particularly those that focus on Chinigchinich, the protocol (law) giver. 10 The creation story as presented in the text is a collaboration of Geronimo Bosacana’s 1846 manuscript and conversations with Acjachemen tribal members and family.

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Tamaayuwut (Earth Mother) along with Tuukumit (Darkness) brought matter from the Milky Way, Wanal Wanawut, to create all life. Wiyoot (Ouiot) was created next; it was he who created humans. In one version of the Acjachemen creation story, Tosaut, a black rock was used to secure the earth in place. It was also from Tosaut that the ocean became salty and instead of flowing like a river, filled the space between the lands. As Wiyoot grew old, his children quarreled and some determined that they must kill him. Wiyoot was poisoned by Frog (Wahawut), after which others attempted to save his life through ceremony and healing from natural springs. The water coming out of the earth in the form of springs holds curative powers in an Acjachemen worldview. Springs are sacred places where spirits exist. From both their creation stories and lived experience Acjachemen know that water is sacred and a source of life and healing. Wiyoot’s children who gathered from all four directions could not save his life. He died, his body was ceremonially burned, and he rose again to be Moyla, the moon, controlling the tides. Wiyoot was the first death and from his death, and Chinigchinich, the people acquired the ceremony for the dead, the funerary customs and protocols; many of which are still observed. Although I have shared but a brief version of the Acjachemen creation story, it is evident from my telling that the elements within the universe, including water, have sacred importance and are to be protected. Although the majority of Acjachemen and Tongva today are Catholic or another denomination of Christianity, due to colonial violences, and may not know or truly understand their pre-contact creation stories, I believe we continue to feel the essence of the stories and know deep within us that our lands and waters are sacred. Furthermore, the loss of these stories for humans is retained by the spirit of our lands and are never completely lost because of this. They are waiting to be re-learned, evaluated, analyzed and applied in ways I can only imagine. Spanish Domestication The monjerio was used as a tool of domestication and colonization; to make Native women useful for the Spanish project of establishing settlements in California. The Spanish concern with heaven and the return of their savior, stopped them from seeing that they were creating an apocalypse for the living. Edward D. Castillo (1994) explained, “At the age of six or seven, the female children were separated from their families and made to live in a carefully locked, all- female barracks called monjerios” (p. 75). Furthermore, Castillo (1994) wrote, “Great cultural damage and emotional suffering were caused by the dismemberment of native families” (p. 75). To domesticate unmarried women and girls into this project they were separated from their families, cut off from the teaching of culture that taught them about sacredness, the power of land and water, and responsibility to the earth. Through the monjerio, the Spanish priests attempted to end their worlds including the ceremonial telling and singing of their creation stories.11

The Spanish intended to disrupt the worlds of California Indians through their institutionalization of a gender binary in contrast to traditional cultural norms. Males and females were strictly separated through both their living quarters and through their labor. The only way for the women to be released from their imprisonment within the monjerio was through marriage, to submit to patriarchy and the heteronormative ideology of marriage between one man 11 California Indian boys within the missions were also subject to a domestication policy. This was enacted through similar logics of domestication focused on their conversion to Catholicism and the Spanish labor system. They became subject to slave labor enforced through harsh punishment.

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and one woman. This concept changed Indian familial relationships. It also enforced a gender binary profoundly felt by both those who were queer and whose gender was outside of Spanish/Christian categorization. According to Antonia I. Castañeda (1997), through the monjerio the Padres attempted to “control and remake native sexuality…” (p. 235). “In particular” she wrote, the domestication of “women’s procreation, was driven as much by material interest as by doctrinal issues” (p. 235). In order to expand the Spanish empire in the eastern Pacific, “California needed a growing Hispanicized Indian population as both a source of labor and as a defense against foreign invasion…” (p. 235). As argued by Castañeda, the domestication of women into the Spanish world and economy was essential for an expanding empire. Yet, as Albert Hurtado (1992) argued, the attempt to completely dis

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