Scan the crowd-sourced Historical Marker Database’s 375 entries for San Diego County and you’ll see a lot about Spanish colonial, early American settler and U.S. military pasts.
Just a handful of the markers mention the millennia-old history of Native Americans in the area. The database mostly ignores places where atrocities were committed against indigenous people.
The database is made of entries by the public, so it’s possible there are historical markers commemorating Native American history that are missing. San Diego historian and archaeologist Richard Carrico said if that’s the case, the omission of thousands of years of indigenous stories, tools and ways of life is less about blame and more an extension of how society views history before the arrival of Europeans.
“Crowdsourcing and those kinds of sites are a really good reflection of American culture and how we look at cultures,” he said. “That's such an ethnocentric colonial view of things.”
For some of the descendants of the four major tribes that once populated the San Diego region — the Luiseno, Cahuilla, Cupeno and Kumeyaay — the historical marker database snub is typical and met with resignation.
“We’re used to it,” said Kumeyaay Community College President Stanley Rodriguez. “I view that as a form of hegemony that is based on a romanticized lie of what has taken place here.”
Rodriguez said the indigenous people of San Diego endured three waves of encroachment: the Spanish with the missions including the first called the San Diego Presidio, then the Spaniards born in Mexico, followed by the Americans. Indigenous people were forcibly converted. Families were split and turned into servants.
“The first governor of California, Peter Burnett, issued bounties on the heads of native people,” Rodriguez said. “Fifty cents for a child, $2.50 for a woman, $5 for men. Over $1.5 million was paid off. Our numbers prior to California becoming a state were over 85% native to 15% non-native. Within 20 years, the numbers had dropped by over 80%.”
Rodriguez said before the Spanish and American invasions, the Kumeyaay thrived.
“Very few people realize there was a very large Kumeyaay village here,” said Rodriguez, standing in Old Town San Diego. “There were communities all through San Diego, all through the bay, all around on the Silver Strand, Coronado, National City and downtown.“
He said men, women and children in the villages rose before the sun. Depending on the season, they’d make tule boats to fish. They would harvest salt, Torrey pine nuts, acorns, chia. They would trade shell beads, abalone, dried fish and lobster with other tribes in the desert and up north for corn, feathers, soap and stone.
The historical markers database for San Diego County does include an entry for an old Kumeyaay natural kitchen, pictographs and the ancient Kumeyaay village Panhe.
But it omits the tribe’s at least 4,000-year-old history in what is today called the Ramona Grasslands Preserve.
“This is a Kumuyaay village site,” said Carrico, standing at the preserve. “It's called Pa’mu which probably means 'gathering place' or 'place of the singers' because they had a lot of music and singing in their culture.”
The area had two springs, a female creek and a male one. Carrico said if a Kumeyaay woman wanted to have a son, she would drink from the male spring and vice versa. The land’s oak trees’ acorns were a major food source for the tribe. They traded shell beads.
“If you could go back in time, you would see huts sitting out here,” Carrico said. “They were doing a lot of tool manufacturing, and they were importing between lithic material, stone material, from as far away as Mammoth and from Baja, California, and from the Salton Sea area.”
Steve Banegas, chair of the museum committee at the Barona Cultural Center and Museum, believes leaving out whole histories of ethnic groups, whether in databases or classrooms, robs people of knowledge and understanding of their collective history.
“They're missing a big chunk of humanity, a big chunk of spirituality, a big chunk of time,” Banegas said.
He contends the omissions not only doom humanity to repeat history, but keep people in the dark about who and what remains.
A sign in the museum is a reminder of Banegas' message. It says of the Kumeyaay, “We’re still here!”
