December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives Paperback - 1980

First line

Although the Chumash Indians seem to have engendered greater interest and respect among early explorers and missionaries than perhaps did any other group in California, they remain to this day a people shrouded in relative obscurity-an obscurity scarcely warranted by their obvious technological sophistication and general level of cultural complexity.

From the rear cover

"These tales are both strange and familiar. . . . they are a fascinating introduction to a complex, little-known, lost people."--World Literature Today "Only two Chumash texts were known before this pulication of 11 myths, folktales, and stories collected by John Peabody Harrington between 1912 and 1928. The texts range from aboriginal narratives centering on Old Man Coyote to nineteenth-century tales borrowed from Mexico."--Pacific Historical Review "The informants are identified and shown in photographs, emerging to remind us how accelerated was the fate of the Chumash; by 1834, the secularization of the missions, they had suffered dispossession of their lands, epidemics, deliberate abortion and a virtual blotting out of their culture. By 1860, when interest in them slowly but belatedly began, there were only a handful of scattered survivors. The handful of informants for these stories were born from 1804 to 1877, a half-dozen men and women . . . The narratives take up more than half the book--111 of them, some as short as a paragraph, mere bits and pieces, other long enough to take two or three days in telling. . . . Whatever else they may be, cognitively or psychologically, they are also entertaining."--Los Angeles Times