Look at the seal of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and you’ll notice a beautiful illustration of a hummingbird in flight. The hummingbird plays a central role in the Amah Mutsun creation story and its prominence in tribal imagery symbolizes this Central Coast people’s ancient connection and ongoing commitment to the natural world. The protection, stewardship, and restoration of the environment that sustained their ancestors for more than 10,000 years is at the heart of Amah Mutsun identity and vital to the tribe’s future, says tribal chair Valentin Lopez.
“As a tribal people, we carry thousands of years of indigenous science within us and know how to manage landscapes, wildlife, waterways, and oceans,” he says. “The coastal prairie of the Central Coast of California was one of the most biodiverse landscapes in North America. Restoring the knowledge of our ancestors is essential, if we're going to heal ourselves and heal the land from the trauma that we both have experienced.”
The traditional lands of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band encompass a region centered on the San Juan Valley between Watsonville and Hollister, where these Ohlone people lived in 20 to 30 distinct village groups. Known as Popeloutchom, the Amah Mutsun territory stretches from the shores of Monterey Bay, through the Santa Cruz Mountains, and north into southern parts of Silicon Valley.
With the arrival of the Spanish in the late 18th century, the Amah Mutsun people were displaced from these lands, forced to give up their traditions, and enslaved. They suffered further persecution under Mexican rule and after California came under the control of the United States in 1848. Huge numbers of the Amah Mutsun died from disease and brutal living conditions—as much as 98 percent of the population perished by the late 19th century.
Lopez says the historic trauma suffered by the Amah Mutsun left today’s tribe facing numerous generational challenges. The tribe’s 600 members are scattered throughout California and the West, with an estimated 80 percent living far from the land of their ancestors. The tribe lacks federal recognition and its own land base but, despite the ongoing hardships, Lopez says the Amah Mutsun people are taking control of their destinies.
“You know, it's our time, it's our time to come back,” he says. “To heal Mother Earth, deal with the issues of climate change, heal ourselves, restore sacredness to the land, and restore our traditional knowledge. Our ceremonies and songs. And so we work hard on that every day as a tribe.”
Keeping Traditions Alive
In 2013, the tribe formed the Amah Mutsun Land Trust as “the vehicle by which the Amah Mutsun access, protect, and steward lands that are integral to our identity and culture,” according to the trust website. The trust conducts research projects to promote Indigenous land management and launched the Native Stewardship Corps to engage younger tribal members in environmental efforts and also help them develop professional and life skills.
The tribe conducts the Coastal Stewardship Summer Camp for children from 10 to 17, during which elders, Native stewards, and representatives from California State Parks reconnect youth to their traditional coastal lands.
The camp includes daily cultural learning and language lessons. “We have them work hard,” Lopez says, “but there’s also playtime built-in each day. We can go to the coast, we can go to the mountains. This past year we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and they had a special program designed for our youth. It was wonderful, just wonderful.”
Lopez says the tribe is committed to providing its members with educational opportunities to keep traditions alive into future generations. “We have weekend programs where our members can come in and learn different kinds of cultural applications,” he says. “For example, we have weekends on how to make cordage—string and rope for nets and traps and basketry. Another area is the processing and use of traditional foods.”
At the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum & Botanic Garden, the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program gives tribal members the chance to discover the native plants their ancestors used and cultivate the tribe’s traditional ecological knowledge. That understanding of the natural world was mostly lost, according to Lopez.
“What we have to do is restore that knowledge,” he says. “Luckily our last traditional leader, Ascención Solórsano, worked with J.P. Harrington, who was an ethnologist and linguist. Together they wrote over 78,000 pages of anthropological field notes and we have copies of it. That knowledge, plus the work we do with the researchers, is very helpful.”
Lopez says the tribe operates a native plant nursery south of Pescadero, where, in 2022, the Amah Mutsun propagated 120,000 plants, many of which were grown for seeds to help revegetate mountain habitat. He says the tribe cultivates more than 40 species, most of which are traditionally used as food plants.
As part of the tribe’s commitment to its ancestral lands, the Amah Mutsun people are fighting to protect Juristac, a sacred site for thousands of years in the Santa Cruz Mountains foothills. The pristine area was the longtime site of ceremonies but is now threatened by a 403-acre open-pit sand-and-gravel mining operation.
The Amah Mutsun also strive to restore the health of both freshwater and marine environments. At Mill Creek in the 8,852-acre San Vicente Redwoods Preserve near Davenport, the tribe worked to remove a century-old dam and reopen prime habitat for Coho salmon and steelhead trout. “Mill Creek is spring-fed,” says Lopez. The water is very clean and cold and those are ideal conditions. And so the salmon have come home.”
Along with the Tolowa Dee-ní Nation, Resighini Rancheria, and the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians of the Stewarts Point Rancheria, the Amah Mutsun tribe was one of the four founding members of the Tribal Marine Stewards Network (TMSN). The network aims to promote tribal stewardship and protection of ancestral coastal areas by using traditional ecological knowledge and through collaborations both among the tribes and with governmental agencies. As part of these efforts, the Amah Mutsun is working on wetland restoration and monitoring at Elkhorn Slough in Monterey County.
Exploring the World of the Amah Mutsun
At the 19,000-acre Sierra Azul Preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of Silicon Valley, Mount Umunhum has deep spiritual significance for the Amah Mutsun. Home to an Air Force radar station for decades, Mount Umunhum (which means hummingbird) reopened to the public in 2017. Trails now lead to the 3,486-foot summit, from which one can take in the full sweep of Monterey Bay as well as the Sierra Nevada to the east and San Francisco to the north. Most of the old radar station’s buildings have been torn down and a sacred circle made of stone was constructed. “It’s a place of our creation story, it’s a very sacred site to our people,” said Lopez in a video for the preserve. “What we wanted to do was to restore the sacredness and the prayers and the ceremonies to the mountain.”
At Pinnacles National Park near Soledad, the tribe has worked with the National Park Service on eco-cultural restoration projects. These efforts are designed to promote the recovery of native plant species once used by the Amah Mutsun, such as deergrass and white root sedge, through the reintroduction of traditional ecological knowledge, including prescribed cultural burns. The California condor (wasaka in the Amah Mutsun language) is sacred to the Amah Mutsun and the tribe has also collaborated with the park service on condor reintroduction projects at Pinnacles and to promote a greater appreciation of the role the birds play within the culture.
Año Nuevo State Park is near the northern edge of the Amah Mutsun’s historic territory and includes the 225-acre Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve. The tribe has worked with state park officials to employ traditional techniques to manage the preserve and on low-impact archaeological research to better understand the relationship of native people to the natural world.
Though only 4.5 acres, Chitactac-Adams Heritage County Park near Gilroy (where a middle school is named for Ascención Solósano) is the site of a village along Uvas Creek that was occupied for more than 3,000 years. A park interpretive trail leads past petroglyphs and bedrock mortars where the inhabitants ground acorns and other seeds.
The Amah Mutsun Land Trust has also designed native plant gardens, including at Castle Rock State Park and San Juan Bautista State Historic Park, to educate the public about the ways that the tribe uses these plants for baskets, medicines, and food.
