Candelaria

       Candelaria was an informant about Chumash culture for the anthropologists George Henley and John Harrington in the first and second decades of the 1900s.  Her contribution was immeasurable in preserving knowledge of the Native American culture of the Ojai Valley.

     She was born about 1840 on Lord’s Creek in the Sespe, in the mountains above Fillmore.   The historic period into which she was born was a time of great trial for the Chumash people.  They no longer had the support of the mission system, which ended in the 1830s; and they were forced to adapt to the new ways of the Anglo-Americans, who took possession of California while she was still a young girl.

     When she reached maturity, she married and bore four children.  For a number of years, she worked as a cook at various locations in the county.

 

     

    Candelaria was contacted about 1900 by George Henley, “an agent of the Smithsonian Institution.”  He obtained basic information from her about the Chumash language.  Then the two lost contact.  About a decade later, Henley found that he had misplaced the information he had obtained from Candelaria, and he sought her out a second time.  He renewed his inquires about Chumash language with greater care and thoroughness.

     Candelaria then began to come to the attention of the public.  A news report of January 9, 1914 described her as seventy-five years old and still accustomed to a diet which included acorns.  In that same year, she was taken to San Diego, where her voice was recorded in the Chumash language for a research society.

     She was a close friend of another Chumash woman by the name of Petra.  The two women wove Chumash baskets, which were sometimes very large.  They taught persons how to weave baskets and how to dye fibers for creating designs.

     Near the end of her life, she lived and worked with her husband Jose Valenzuela on Nick Peirano’s ranch in the Santa Ana Valley.  In March 1915, she was working in a grove on the ranch at a field stove, when she suffered severe burns.  She died at the home of one of her sons in Ventura on March 17, 1915. 

     We owe much to Candelaria for her generous sharing of her knowledge of the Chumash language, culture and crafts.   Our awareness of the richness of that culture would be more limited had she not been prepared to share her knowledge for the benefit of future generations.

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Handmade Recreations of Chumash Artifacts

by Richard Hoye

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