The Tomol People: A History of the Chumash of the Channel Coast
By Daniel R. Avelar
Length4h 19m
About this audiobook
What holds together a boat with no keel, no rudder and not a single nail? Planks split from driftwood, thinned, curved and fitted edge to edge. Seams sewn with twisted plant fiber. And every stitch sealed with yop, the black tar that seeps up along the Santa Barbara Channel and hardens almost to glass. The people of the channel had been building the tomol this way for more than a thousand years.
Before dawn, four men kneel in one of these canoes off the eastern shore of Limuw, drifting in fog so thick they can see neither the island behind them nor the mainland ahead. Lashed amidships are four soapstone ollas quarried on Pimugna and bound for Syuxtun, where a chief has already agreed, through kin and old obligation, to receive them. The canoe bound the islands and the coast from Humaliwo to Morro Bay into one world of towns, each with its own chief, its own fishing rocks and its own name. The people the outside world now calls Chumash called themselves by those names.
From those crossings the history runs through the arrival of the Spanish ships, the missions, the uprising of 1824, the Mexican years and the gold rush, and into the scattering and remembering that followed. It closes with the tomol back on the water and the question of sovereignty on the channel today.
Stone from an island, acorns from the mainland, and between them twenty miles of cold water that only a sewn-plank canoe could cross.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 19 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The First Crossing
2Chapter 2: Towns of the Coast
3Chapter 3: Island Trade
4Chapter 4: Wooden Ships, Iron and Greed
5Chapter 5: The Mission Bell
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6Chapter 6: The Spanish and the Channel
7Chapter 7: The Uprising of 1824
8Chapter 8: The Mexican Years
9Chapter 9: Gold Rush and Aftermath
10Chapter 10: Diaspora and Memory
11Chapter 11: The Canoe Returns
12Chapter 12: Sovereignty and the Channel
13About the Author
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