Kumeyaay Specific Resources

Kumeyaay Community College

Kumeyaay Community College (KCC) offers the Associate of Arts degree in Kumeyaay Studies, offered through Cuyamaca College. The degree is designed to provide an understanding of Kumeyaay history, culture and heritage, and draws from the sciences, humanities, world languages and history departments. KCC is a wonderful place for anyone looking to learn more about the Kumeyaay people and culture, as courses can be taken toward a degree or independently. Courses include Ethnoecology, Ethnobotany, Kumeyaay History, Kumeyaay Arts and Culture, and Kumeyaay Language. To enroll in KCC courses, you must become a student first at Cuyamaca College.

Members of the SHPA grant are grateful to learn from Dr. Stan Rodriguez who is one of our mentors, and is Director of KCC as well as instructor of the Kumeyaay Language and Kumeyaay Tools courses.

Barona Cultural Center and Museum

The Barona Cultural Center & Museum is dedicated to preserving the Native American culture and history of San Diego County. With more than 3,000 artifacts, listening alcoves, photographic displays, and archives, the Museum’s historic treasures unfold many fascinating and inspiring stories of the Kumeyaay/Diegueño experience. As San Diego County’s only museum on an Indian reservation dedicated to the perpetuation and presentation of the local Native culture, the Barona Museum offers a unique educational journey for visitors of all ages.

The Barona Cultural Center and Museum showcases maps and treaties of ancient Tribal territories, interactive displays of Kumeyaay/Diegueño life, listening alcoves featuring sounds and songs of ancient Native American life and exhibits that illustrate important industries of the people, such as basketry, pottery making, and flaking of stone tools. The museum’s collection includes everyday items such as coiled baskets and grinding stones, ceramic and shell objects (some ceremonial), and currency. Research materials are also available. Our library houses over a thousand books, including some that are rare and out-of-print, and we have an extensive archive of photos and historical documents to help visitors discover more about how the ancient ancestors lived.

Imperial Valley Desert Museum

Field Trips and “History on the Go” school-site classes

School/Tribal Liaison - Rebecca (Becky) Blackwood - rebeccablackwood75@gmail.com

The Imperial Valley Desert museum is in the heart of the Yuha Desert and houses Native American and historic artifacts found within the Imperial Valley. The mission of the museum is to “preserve, interpret, and celebrate the deserts of Southern California through outstanding collections, research, and educational program.”

In 2014 the documentary First People-Kumeyaay was produced, drawn from over 70 hours of oral interviews with culture bearers from the Kumeyaay Nation and focused on the importance of sharing and maintaining cultural heritage and passing it on to future generations. The Imperial Valley Desert Museum received the rights and access to the 70 hours of raw interview footage and is working to include as much of it as possible in a new permanent exhibit.

Sycuan Cultural Resource Center & Museum

The Sycuan Cultural Resource Center and Museum opened in December 2016 within the prehistoric Kumeyaay village of Matamo. The museum is a gathering place for curated artifacts, housing research and educational materials for use by tribal members and the general public, as well as a host location for exhibits, programs and other services. Three special components reside at the center and museum: the Florence Shipek archival collection of oral histories, textual records, language materials and field notes; thousands of ancient artifacts from the Everly subdivision; and the Wallberg collection of Kumeyaay baskets. Numerous displays with educational components, historical photos, pre-contact artifacts and other cultural material serve as vibrant visual displays to further the research and educational experience. A wall-length timeline and pictogram serves as a striking summation of more than 12,000 years of Kumeyaay history over the ages and into the modern era.

Museum of Us

The Museum of Us has a Kumeyaay: Native Californians/Iipai-Tipai exhibit that explores traditional and contemporary Kumeyaay lifeways. The exhibit features the art of pottery and basket making, food procurement, dress and adornment, traditional medicine, games, and ceremonies. The museum also has a Kumeyaay Cosmology Dome that explores the traditionals and meanings of Kumeyaay cosmological beliefs that center on the Kumeyaay Mat’taam (calendar year), My Uuyow (sky knowledge), and constellation map. This exhibit – the first-ever museum exhibit about Kumeyaay astronomy – was developed by curator and Kumeyaay scholar, Michael Connolly Miskwish, and Mataam Naka Shin, the San Diego-Panama Exposition Centennial Intertribal Committee.

Additionally, the Museum of Us features a Kumeyaay: Native Californians/Iipai-Tipai educational program for students, recommended for grades 3-5. With this program, students will go back in time and explore the four geographic regions of San Diego long ago through an interactive and object-based tour. Groups will explore the Indigenous culture of San Diego through hands-on discovery, observation, and research. By using some of the natural resources that provided food, water, clothing, shelter, and medicine to its inhabitants for thousands of years, the group will discover how the Indigenous peoples would have lived long ago in San Diego. Afterwards, students will inspect and identify historical Indigenous objects such as: pottery, basketry, tools for hunting, and traditional clothes used by San Diego’s first residents, the Kumeyaay Nation.

La Rumarosa Rock Art Along the Border

Speaker/Presenter; Field Trips to Ancient Kumeyaay Rock Art

Dr. Donald Frank Liponi - dliponi@yahoo.com

Dr. Liponi wrote La Rumarosa Rock Art Along the Border to explore the Native American prehistoric artwork of the mountainous and desert wilderness along the California-Baja California border, as well as other areas of the Southwest. The book contains more than 200 vibrant color photographs, including mostly newly discovered rock art sites. The book also contains interviews with Kumeyaay community members and a review of the pertinent professional literature by noted archaeologists, Native Americans and licensed volunteers. In the past, scholars have had the opportunity to hike and explore Kumeyaay rock art as a group.