The Chumash Rainbow Bridge: A Creation Story of Island, Mainland and Dolphins

The Chumash people were born on Limuw — Santa Cruz Island, now part of Channel Islands National Park. Hutash, Mother Earth, made them there from the seeds of a magic plant, and her husband Alchupo'osh, Sky Snake — the Milky Way — gave them fire, and their numbers grew. Soon the island was crowded, and their noise annoyed Hutash. She decided they needed a larger home and made a rainbow bridge from the island to the mainland. As the people crossed, some grew dizzy looking down into the mist and fell into the ocean. Hutash took pity on them and turned them into dolphins, whom the Chumash today call their brothers and sisters.

This Chumash creation describes Limuw (Santa Cruz Island) as the birthplace of the Chumash people. NPS.

"Stories are actually teachings"

In a short National Park Service video, Chumash elder Julie Tumamait-Stenslie tells the "Rainbow Bridge" story standing on the shore of Limuw, a name meaning "in the sea." She can trace her Chumash ancestry to the island, and led the Barbareño/Ventureño Band of Mission Indians for 22 years before stepping down in 2023. She has worked tirelessly to revive her culture's lifeways, sacred sites and above all its stories — which, she says, people call fairytale, myth and lore, but which "are actually teachings."

She traces this version of the story to Santa Barbara in the 1930s. The Chumash had lived through the trauma of the Spanish missions — missionaries had taken her own ancestors from Limuw and forced them to build Mission San Buenaventura in 1782 — and were enduring federal Indian boarding schools that tore children from their homes. That history of colonization and forced assimilation, she explains, has made it "a struggle to find our place in our natural world." Stories like this one are a way back: to the Indigenous past, to the Chumash homelands, and to Mother Earth.

What the story teaches

In her teaching, Tumamait-Stenslie talks about protecting the earth — slowing down, restoring landscapes with native plants — and about learning the stories of Indigenous homelands, which teach the beauty of the land, so that people will treat Mother Earth as sacred. "It's our only place," she says. "It is our one home."

Sources

Based on "Chumash Rainbow Bridge Creation Story" by Nicole Martin, PhD, part of the National Park Service's Home and Homelands exhibition (Channel Islands National Park), made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on Channel Islands National Park's "Limuw: A Story of Place" and "Native Inhabitants," Julie Tumamait-Stenslie's talk "Bringing the Past into the Future" (TEDxLagunaBlancaSchool, 2022) and essay "My Chumash Ancestral Legacy" (2011), and the Ventura County Star (2023).

• The film and any audio are the National Park Service's own files, from the source page.