Chumash Rainbow Bridge Creation Story

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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The Chumash “Rainbow Bridge” creation story describes Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) as the birthplace of the Chumash people. Hutash (Mother Earth) created the people on the island with the seeds of a magic plant. Her husband, Alchupo’osh (Sky Snake, or the Milky Way) gifted the people fire, which allowed the island population to grow. Soon, Limuw was crowded, and the noise the humans made annoyed Hutash. She decided they needed a new, larger home, so she created a rainbow bridge connecting the island to the mainland. As the people crossed, some became dizzy looking down into the mist and fell into the ocean. Hutash took pity on them and transformed them into dolphins, who the Chumash today call their brothers and sisters.¹

Duration:

3 minutes, 18 seconds

This Chumash creation describes Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) as the birthplace of the Chumash people. Told by Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, Chumash elder.

Stories are Teachings

In the video, Chumash elder, Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, recites the “Rainbow Bridge” story while standing on the shores of Limuw, which means “in the sea.” Today Santa Cruz Island is protected as part of Channel Islands National Park. Julie, who can trace her Chumash ancestry back to Limuw, served as the tribal leader of the Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians for twenty-two years before stepping down in 2023. She has tirelessly educated and advocated for the revival of her culture’s lifeways and sacred sites, especially Chumash stories. She explains that stories – what people call fairytale, myth, and lore – “are actually teachings.”²

The “Rainbow Bridge” story imparts a number of lessons about how the Chumash embody home and homeland. Julie traces the creation story to 1930s Santa Barbara, after the Chumash had lived through the trauma of the Spanish mission era. Missionaries had removed Julie’s own ancestors from Limuw and forced them to build Mission San Buenaventura in 1782. The story also emerges at a moment in which the Chumash were experiencing the trauma of federal Indian boarding schools, which tore Indigenous children from their homes. This history of colonization and coerced assimilation, Julie explains, has made it “a struggle to find our place in our natural world.”³ Stories like the “Rainbow Bridge” can be thought of as a tool for finding the Indigenous past and reconnecting to the specific homelands of the Chumash – but also Mother Earth more generally.

Connections of Time and Place

When Hutash decides to expand the Chumash homeland from island to mainland, she makes a bridge out of a wishtoyo (rainbow). The wishtoyo connects the past island life with the promise of a future, larger homeland on the mainland. In the present, Julie works to recover Chumash lifeways – and the “memory of being Indigenous” – to help people see that the past is hidden in plain sight. By reconnecting to the past through our relationship to the natural world, we will bring the past’s teachings into the future and be better prepared to live in the place “that can still sustain us today.”⁴

The Chumash homeland, Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) at sunset.

Tim Hauf, timhaufphotography.com

The wishtoyo also merges land and sea by connecting island to mainland. The story teaches that the two are one, not unlike how the pre-contact Chumash lived. For at least 13,000 years, they hunted and gathered from the riches of both land and sea, their territory spanning from present day San Luis Obispo to Malibu. Starting 1,500 years ago, they navigated between island and mainland in tomols, plank canoes made of redwood logs.⁵ Every season, they gave and took from the land and sea in a reciprocal relationship. Julie hopes we can recapture this life of “reciprocities” before it is too late to heal the damage done to her ancestral homelands.

The Chumash believe dolphins, like the one pictured here in the sea surrounding the Channel Islands, are our brothers and sisters.

Tim Hauf, timhaufphotography.com

Our Only Home

The “Rainbow Bridge” story also embeds a lesson about honoring all life. Hutash cannot help but turn the falling humans into dolphins, inextricably linking the two species. By calling the dolphins their brothers and sisters, the Chumash put forth a worldview about protecting not just ourselves but also the non-human elements of our surroundings.

In her education work, Julie speaks about how we must protect the earth, whether that be slowing down or restoring our landscapes with native species. What matters most is that we all work together to learn the stories of Indigenous homelands, the stories that can teach us about the beauty of our landscapes. Only then will we treat Mother Earth as sacred. “It’s our only place,” Julie teaches us, “It is our one home.”⁶

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation. 

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¹ “Limuw: A Story of Place,” Channel Islands National Park.

² Wes Woods, “Region's Chumash Group Sets Course Under New Leadership,” Ventura County Star, March 4, 2023. Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, “Bringing the Past into the Future,” TEDxLagunaBlancaSchool, February 2022.

³ Julie Tumamait-Stenslie, “My Chumash Ancestral Legacy,” Ojai History, August 11, 2011. Tumamait-Stenslie, “Bringing the Past into the Future.” For more on the Chumash experience in boarding schools, see “Memories of Sherman School,” Chumash Life.

⁴ Tumamait-Stenslie, “Bringing the Past into the Future.”

⁵ “Native Inhabitants,” Channel Islands National Park.

⁶ Tumamait-Stenslie, “Bringing the Past into the Future.”