For thousands of years, the Kumeyaay people of northern Baja California and southern California made their homes in the diverse landscapes of the region, interacting with native plants and continuously refining their botanical knowledge. Today, many Kumeyaay Indians in the far-flung ranches of Baja California carry on the traditional knowledge and skills for transforming native plants into food, medicine, arts, tools, regalia, construction materials, and ceremonial items. Kumeyaay Ethnobotany explores the remarkable interdependence between native peoples and native plants of the Californias through in-depth descriptions of 47 native plants and their uses, lively narratives, and hundreds of vivid photographs. It connects the archaeological and historical record with living cultures and native plant specialists who share their ever-relevant wisdom for future generations. Book jacket.

Easy-to-read text and colorful illustrations and photos teach readers about Kumeyaay history, traditions, and modern life. This book describes society and family structure, hunting, fishing, and gathering methods, and ceremonies and rituals. Readers will learn about Kumeyaay homes, clothing, and crafts such as baskets and pottery. A traditional myth is included, as is a description of famous Kumeyaay leader Jane Dumas. Wars, weapons, and contact with Europeans are discussed. Topics including European influence, assimilation, missionaries, the formation of reservations, and federal recognition are also addressed. In addition, modern Kumeyaay culture and still-celebrated traditions such as bird songs are described. Kumeyaay homelands are illustrated with a detailed map of the United States. Bold glossary terms and an index accompany engaging text. This book is written and illustrated by Native Americans, providing authentic perspectives of the Kumeyaay.

This monograph provides a glimpse of the Kumeyaay cosmology with worldview, observatories, constellations and stories, including modern interpretations of the calendar. Kumeyaay cosmology was traditionally intertwined with ceremonies, harvest & hunts, burning schedules and the acquisition of spiritual power. Personal conduct was subject to cosmological constraints and rewards. Cosmology was so important that Spanish priests and subsequent U.S. government agents worked hard to repress and expunge the beliefs from Kumeyaay society.

Easy-to-read text and colorful illustrations and photos teach readers about Kumeyaay history, traditions, and modern life. This book describes society and family structure, hunting, fishing, and gathering methods, and ceremonies and rituals. Readers will learn about Kumeyaay homes, clothing, and crafts such as baskets and pottery. A traditional myth is included, as is a description of famous Kumeyaay leader Jane Dumas. Wars, weapons, and contact with Europeans are discussed. Topics including European influence, assimilation, missionaries, the formation of reservations, and federal recognition are also addressed. In addition, modern Kumeyaay culture and still-celebrated traditions such as bird songs are described. Kumeyaay homelands are illustrated with a detailed map of the United States. Bold glossary terms and an index accompany engaging text. This book is written and illustrated by Native Americans, providing authentic perspectives of the Kumeyaay.

This volume provides a concise history of the Kumeyaay people. The book takes the reader from the time prior to contact with Europeans, through the period of Spanish presidios, colonization, and missionization, into the period of Mexican colonization and the vast rancheros, finally culminating with the American period from 1848 to 1873. The Kumeyaay are Native American people whose traditional homelands extended from Escondido to the Laguna Mountains (San Diego County, CA) in the U.S., to Ensenada, and Tecate (Baja California) in Mexico.

A book-length poem about how an American Indian writer can’t bring himself to write about nature, but is forced to reckon with colonial-white stereotypes, manifest destiny, and his own identity as an young, queer, urban-dwelling poet. A Best Book of the Year at BuzzFeed, Interview, and more. Nature Poem follows Teebs—a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet—who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant—bratty, even—about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice.

Author Paul Campbell reveals the knowledge he has spent 20 years learning and reproducing from California natives. Included are sections on the basic skills of survival, the tools of gathering and food preparation, and the implements of household and personal necessity, as well as the arts of hunting and fishing. Sample topics include: shelter; greens, beans, flowers and other vegetables; meat preparation; how to make and shoot an Indian bow.--From publisher description.

Some may question what the Kumeyaay Native Americans have to do with San Diego's Whaley House and what do they both have to do with ghosts? The Whaley House is a historical landmark in Old Town, San Diego and the Kumeyaay are native to the San Diego area. The Whaley House is one of the most haunted and considered to be the most famous haunted house in the United States. Visitors to the Whaley House have often experienced ghostly encounters. The Whaley House is built upon land that once belonged to the Kumeyaay. The Kumeyaay suffered much including the fact that their homeland was stolen from them and they experienced historical and traumatizing mistreatment by many conquering populations throughout their history. Do these factors have a connection to the haunting at the Whaley House? Read on to find out more.

A photographic and professional archaeologic survey of the La Rumorosa rock art style. Nearly all of the half, full page and double page photographs have never been published previously. The text is contributed by regional archaeologists who add context to the images.