Native American Heritage Month
Welcome to Native American Heritage Month
As a Native-led organization, Wishtoyo is place, organization, and movement inspiring people to live in harmony with our Earth again. We’re honored to invite you to follow our online stories stretching through 24 years of community work.
Throughout this month we’ll be presenting a mini series of stories to celebrate Chumash and Indigenous peoples collectively diverse cultures and contributions that our communities are making today and have made throughout history, as everyday is Native American Day.
As the original caretakers of the Northern Channel Islands, Coastal California from Point Dume to Point Conception, through San Luis Obispo and inland through the Santa Ynez, San Emigdio, Sierra Madre, Santa Monica, Santa Susana Mountains and Simi Hills, we, Chumash and Indigenous people have survived and thrived more than 15,000 years in these bio regions because of our relationships with the bountiful natural cultural resources that have allowed us to build strong and highly developed societies.
We are a land-based people who have been denied access to our own homelands (diaspora-in-place). The abundance and wealth of our traditional lifeways, was replaced by the scarcity and hardship brought by settler colonialism. But even more detrimental to our collective wellbeing is the fact that, because we see the land as part of ourselves, we have been living in alienation from the very core of our being for generations. Still, we have sustained our cultures and maintained our community cohesiveness in the face of this displacement and landlessness. We recognize that the land remembers us, has been waiting for us, and is welcoming us back into relationship, reciprocity, and abundance.
Now that we have land back on our own traditional sites, we’re reestablishing our regenerative relationships, and restoring natural and cultural abundance -- we are ultimately in the process of healing our land and people as one.
Join us throughout Native American Heritage Month to witness this ever-evolving process of healing our relationships with community, land and waters through traditional values, beliefs, expressions of culture, and results through fierce dedication of so many who came before us and the community that guides us in this ongoing reclamation and restoration of natural ecosystems, propagation and harvesting practices, spiritual wellness and language, ultimately restoring our bonds of kinship with our entire community of living and non-living beings.
Mati Waiya, Executive Director Wishtoyo Foundation
Enrolled Member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation
Me’pšumawiš a tipašumawiš
Together we are healthy and spiritually at peace
