The Luiseño Culture Bank Project: From Museum Shelves to HyperCard

Abstract

On a small reservation in rural San Diego County, tribal elders, progressive administrators, university librarians, and technical advisors have forged a collaborative partnership to preserve the Luiseiio cultural heritage. In the 1970s, Luiseiio elders and volunteers secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund a project involving the gathering of secondary information on Luiseiio artifacts and information from a variety of museums, libraries, and private collections. Following up on the creation of the Luiseiio Culture Bank, university librarians from California State University, San Marcos, are now engaged in a project that eventually will mount this “bank” onto a Hypercard database. The San Luiseiio Band of Mission Indians derive their name from their association with Mission San Luis Rey in northern San Diego County.’ Established in 1798 by Franciscan fathers, Mission San Luis Rey is known as the ”king of the missions.” However, the treatment of the native peoples by Spanish missionaries was anything but royal. Contact between native peoples and Europeans had a devastating effect on the social, cultural, and economic life of the Indians. Within sixty-five years of the arrival of Juniper0 Serra in 1769, the population of California Indians was reduced by