On California’s Central Coast, an Indoor-Outdoor Museum Connects Visitors With Centuries of Chumash Heritage
The Chumash Heritage Marine Sanctuary was featured on Condé Nast Traveler’s Bright Ideas in Travel 2025. Read the full list of winners here. I am greeted by cast iron doors, engraved with spiraling pictographs and cool to the touch, even in the morning heat of June. I grip the handle—shaped, I’ll learn, like a clapper stick, a traditional Chumash percussion instrument—and push it open.
The sounds of birdsong, layered and ambient, rise toward a curved ceiling where light moves like cloud shadow. Here, what lies indoors simulates the beauty of the natural world. I have entered an ‘Ap, the Chumash word for home, reimagined at monumental scale. The traditional version would have been made of willow branches and tule reeds, but this one is steel and stone with the same circular, embracing shape: This is the 14,000-square-foot Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center, which opened on May 15, 2025, after 20 years in the making.
Every detail has been designed with intention by Native American architect Johnpaul Jones. The ancestral home of the Chumash, the Indigenous Native American people who have lived along California’s central coast for more than 13,000 years, spans from Malibu to Paso Robles, including the Northern Channel Islands. In 2024, Chumash stewardship of more than 4,500 square miles of sea and coast in this region was formalized on the federal level as part of the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, the first-ever Indigenous-led marine sanctuary in the US.
The new museum is the most visible piece
The new museum is the most visible piece of a broader, sustained effort to connect visitors to California’s central coast with Chumash culture. The tribe’s Culture Department runs a state-credentialed language program—two of its teachers hold the specialized credential that California created in 2008 for Native language instruction—alongside basket weaving classes, an archery club, a youth camp, and a cultural re
“The circular shapes of the buildings, the model of the oak tree where the coyote lives in the Maria Solares Discovery Center, and the west-facing direction of the buildings represent important symbolism to our people,” says Kenneth Kahn, Chairman of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. The museum faces the Western Gates, or Point Conception—a spot on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which tribal beliefs describe as the place one departs this world and enters the spirit realm.
Felicia Cogorno, Education Programs & Volunteer Manager and tribal member, tells me that if I stand in exactly the right place in the center of the museum’s main room, I’ll hear my own voice come back to me. I find the spot—a subtle seam in the floor’s inlaid pattern—and say something small and ordinary. For a moment, my voice and the birdsong, and the fire and the Sʰamala (Santa Ynez Band native language) words floating from a nearby speaker, are all one sound, indistinguishable from each other.
Cogorno grew up on the reservation, on whose
Cogorno grew up on the reservation, on whose lands the center now stands, and manages its education programs and volunteers. She points to the ring of painted figures along the upper walls, each mid-movement, each representing a different animal, each placed at a different ancestral village along the central California coast. “If you were being welcomed to our village,” she says, “you would be welcomed with singing and dancing.”
I wave my hand near the fire.
The movement activates the walls where animals light up—deer, bear, condor—each one accompanied by a voice pronouncing its name in Sʰamala, the language of the Santa Ynez Band. The polished stone floor, meanwhile, is inlaid with a seasonal round: concentric rings mapping harvests and hunts and gathering times, labeled in Sʰamala and English, with a bit of Spanish woven in.
As Cogorno explains, the arrival of the Gregorian calendar required new words for things that hadn’t needed naming before. Before going further into the museum, I stop at a photograph of a woman hanging on the wall. I continue to see her image, reappearing throughout the galleries like a thread you keep finding in the weave. Her name is Maria Solares, I learn. In the early 1900s, she was one of the last fluent speakers of Sʰamala.
Between 1914 and 1915, she worked with linguist
Between 1914 and 1915, she worked with linguist John Peabody Harrington, sitting for sessions that produced wax cylinder recordings of the languages and more than 100,000 pages of notes. The language survived because she sat in that room and spoke. “She’s my five-times great-grandmother,” Cogorno says, matter-of-factly. “Many of our volunteers are also descendants of Maria.”
The permanent galleries are accessed off the ‘ap lobby area through a set of iron doors whose design, Cogorno mentions, was made by her aunt.
Inside, the ceiling rises and the light changes, cooler, darker. The exhibit moves through the Chumash cosmology of three worlds—Upper, Middle, and Lower—stacked like basket trays. Most of what surrounds me is the Middle World, the et ya shoop (“here world”) display. Cases hold stone tools, hunting materials, and abalone ceremony regalia. Paintings that line the walls show figures fishing, gathering, and paddling.
The objects in the cases mirror what the figures carry. I stop at a case of abalone shells, cut into jewelry and adornments, and polished to a high shine, almost iridescent under the gallery lights. “My cousin made those,” Cogorno says. Nearby, there’s a swordfish headdress with intricate shell work—her aunt, who cast the door handles at the entrance, made that, too. In the Upper World gallery, a taxidermied California condor has her own case, her own story.
In 1986, when only 27 California condors remained
In 1986, when only 27 California condors remained on earth, she was the last wild female of her species before she was captured, then put into a breeding program. Because of this, she raised the next generation and was released with them, teaching the young birds, somehow, to be condors in a world that had nearly erased them. Nearby, a painting depicts the Condor dance, one of the newer dances in the Chumash tradition.
“To me, [the condor return] represents a cultural resurgence,” Cogorno says. “We’re still here. We’re still thriving. We’re not static.”
Outside, the Culture Park opens wide across the landscape. Native plantings—dogbane, yerba mansa—border brooks and pools that are fed by greywater, which the tribe recycles on-site. The limestone underfoot came from a quarry twenty minutes away.
Further down the path stands the Tomol House, an open-slatted building that holds its namesake: a 950-pound plank canoe known as a tomol. It is not a relic, but a vessel that regularly hits the water. This very tomol has made what is known as “the crossing”—a culturally significant journey across 26 miles of open Pacific water from Ventura to the Channel Islands—multiple times.
The crossing takes 10-13 hours, with 6 people
The crossing takes 10-13 hours, with 6 people sitting on their knees to paddle. Moving by feel and tradition toward an island they could reach in twenty minutes by motorboat. Jennifer, one of the museum’s volunteers and one of the only women to captain a tomol, joins me inside. She talks about the crossing the way any athlete talks about a journey that changed them. “You really connect with past ancestors,” she says.
I continue on, following an audio narration, drawn from the voices of tribal leaders, that guides me through the middle of the museum, chronicling the mission period—a traumatic era that involved the boarding schools, the forced silencing of language, and the cutting of hair. A time when children were taken away and conditioned into believing their heritage shameful. But as I walk further, the room shifts to contemporary photographs.
Ceremonies, children, laughter, a tomol coming into shore. A collection of moments that show the Chumash thriving. On my way out, I pass the seasonal round again—the acorns of fall, the fishing of summer—and I grip the clapper stick door handle one more time. The birds still sing overhead. I push through into the heat and the light, back into the valley the Chumash never left.
The Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center is located in Santa Ynez, California, and is open Thursday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Source: www.cntraveler.com
