Abstract
“I’m haplo D group, which is one of the more ancient . . . . I’m 13,000 years old and you can tell [self-conscious laugh] . . . it’s an honor.” So begins 6 Generations, with Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto’s voice. Her great-great-great-grandmother was born by the river behind the Santa Barbara Mountains in 1769, the very year that Fr. Junipero Serra founded the first Alta California mission (in San Diego, 220 miles to the south). “I’m not a full-blood Chumash. There are none,” she cautions, “but I think of myself as Chumash, first and foremost, even though I do have Hispanic and English in me, and those are not by my choice.” A self-described “living link,” she remembers her great-uncle, the last pure-blood Chumash. “I am their voice.” Thirty years ago, Ms. De Soto ran into John Johnson, working on his doctoral dissertation in the Mission Santa Barbara archive. When she saw the original mission records, Ms. De Soto found herself confronting a very personal family history. Her mother, recently deceased, was the last native speaker of the Chumash language. “This is just stepping back in time, like a time machine . . . more of a puzzle than a mystery, and all the pieces now fit . . . completely.” Years later, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History (where John Johnson is now a curator) invited Ms. De Soto to become a model for their diorama on early Chumash lifeways, and she agreed. As their relationship prospered, they eventually teamed up to craft a first-person performance called “Voices from the Indian Orchard: Six Generations of Chumash Women Speak.” In 6 Generations, filmmaker Paul Goldsmith captures this gripping narrative on film as it welds together these multiple ways of knowing the past: a friar’s handwritten mission record, 2 centuries of Chumash oral
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