New Generation Keeps Chumash Tomol Tradition Alive
Friends, Family, an Elders Take Part in ‘Village Hop’
It’s early Sunday morning in late November, and a close-knit group of Chumash friends, family, and elders have gathered together along the shores of West Beach — on land that was originally the village of Syuxtun — to prepare for a “village hop,” where the community paddles its traditional tomol, or canoe, between West Beach and Leadbetter.
Spenser Jaimes is a 20-year-old Šmuwič-Chumash documentarian and part of a new generation of Indigenous youth taking traditions and marrying them with the modern age. He made waves at the 2022 Santa Barbara International Film Festival with his first-ever short film, Connected by Water, which documented a traditional paddle-out into the Santa Barbara Channel by members of the Coastal Band of Chumash, Tongva, and Acjachemen tribal nations in their redwood-plank vessels.
Thousands of years ago, Jaimes says, the channel was packed with the tomols returning to shore packed with fish for the villages, back when golden poppies covered the island hillsides of Limuw (now known as Santa Cruz). On a clear day, you could see the flowers sparkling in the sun.
