Indians at Mission Santa Bárbara: Life at the Mission in 1800

The Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library presents:
“Indians at Mission Santa Bárbara: Life at the Mission in 1800”
Featuring Dr. John Johnson

Sunday December 4 at 3:00 in the Bonaventure Room at Old Mission Santa Bárbara.

This lecture is part of the celebration of the 225th anniversary of Mission Santa Bárbara. Admission is free, but donations to the Archive-Library are gladly accepted.

What was Chumash life really like at the Old Mission? So much ink has been spilled about this topic, but often descriptions are not based on original documentary evidence. Dr. John Johnson has spent thirty-five years gathering information about the culture and history of Santa Barbara’s original inhabitants. He will present a lecture about Native Americans at Mission Santa Bárbara based upon primary archival sources preserved in the Santa Bárbara Mission Archive-Library, as well as oral traditions passed down in Barbareño Chumash families that were recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

John R. Johnson, Ph.D., has worked as Curator of Anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History since 1986. He is also Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he has taught an annual course on California Indians since 2003. Johnson became directly involved in research using the mission registers preserved at the Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library in a study of Chumash marriage and family patterns for his 1988 Ph.D. dissertation in anthropology at UCSB. He has served as a member of the Archive-Library’s Board of Trustees of since 1993. Johnson has written more than eighty studies, including journal articles, chapters in edited volumes, and several monographs pertaining to ethnohistorical, archaeological, and genetic research regarding California’s original inhabitants. He works closely with contemporary California Indians and recently produced a documentary film, 6 Generations, regarding the history of a Chumash family in Santa Barbara.

For more information contact Monica Orozco at director@sbmal.org

hm 10/31/11