America's Original Artisans Go Back to the Land
For nearly 15,000 years, the Chumash people have called coastal California home. Before contact with European settlers, the tribe occupied 7,000 square miles of exceptionally fertile land near what is today Santa Barbara. The conquest and settlement of California, first by Spain and then by the United States, hemmed in the Chumash, making them secondary citizens on a land they thought had been granted to them by the gods. In 1901, the tribe was confined to 127 acres on the Santa Ynez Reservation. For most of the 20th century, that reservation, like most others across the nation, was a nearly invisible ghetto where Native Americans languished without any serious prospects for economic uplift or cultural recognition.
Richard Gomez was born into this world. Today a tribal elder of the Chumash, he remembers the long days of fieldwork on his grandparents’ farm and waiting for a truck to arrive with government handouts of food and clothes. Prospects began to improve for the tribe in the early 1990s, when the Chumash opened a casino; in 2000, California made casino gambling exclusive to Native American tribes, effectively granting them a monopoly. The casino continued to grow so that, by 2004, the Los Angeles Times reported that “each of the 153 members of the Santa Ynez band has received more than $1 million in casino income.”
In 1994, Gomez’s daughter Tara was heading off to
