Daring Dreams for Dos Pueblos Ranch

Daring Dreams for
Dos Pueblos Ranch

Conservation, Education, Restoration, and More Planned for Historic Gaviota Coast Property

By Matt Kettmann | Photos by Macduff Everton | January 5, 2023

With an otter pelt slung from his shoulder and a kelp-bulb rattle shaking in his hand, Aleqwel Mendoza and his wife, Marissa Velez, are singing verses from their Chumash people’s pelican song, just as a lone pelican flashes alongside the nearby cliffs and dives into the sea. It’s a few days before the winter solstice, and the sun is burning warm and brilliant above the small group of us who’ve gathered at Dos Pueblos Ranch to talk about ways of the past, challenges of the present, and hopes for the future.

The couple had just finished an up-tempo song about the woodrat near where their ceremonial solstice pole — its yucca shaft covered in asphaltum and abalone shell, topped with blue heron feathers — will soon be hoisted to overlook the Santa Barbara Channel. A little while earlier, after chopping tule reeds from the estero to weave, Mendoza had let out a few lines from a whale song when we saw one spout a couple hundred yards off of the coast. 

We’re standing on the grassy Gaviota Coast bluff that for generations housed the Chumash village of Mikiw, just across a creek from the neighboring clifftop village of Kuya’mu. Velez draws her ancestral ties to these villages — specifically to Chief Beato Temicucat, who died in 1821 — while Mendoza’s roots are a touch farther west, at the village of Qasil, in today’s Refugio Canyon. As “most likely descendants,” or MLDs, from this coastal paradise, both dream of a more established, rather than passing, presence around these ancient sites, one that synthesizes spiritual, educational, historical, and ecological goals into a cohesive experience.