The Long Canoe — A Circle Time Story

There is an island in the sea called Limuw.

Do you remember the blue bird who lives only here? With the black mask and the loud voice and the acorns? She is back. She sits in her oak tree, on the hill above the shore. This morning, she is looking out over the water.

The water is flat and shiny. The sun is just coming up. The fog is thin.

And then —

SHEK-SHEK-SHEK!

The blue bird sees something. Far out on the water. A small dark shape, low and long, coming slowly toward the shore.

SHEK-SHEK! SOMETHING IS COMING!

She tilts her head. She looks harder.

It is a canoe. A long, narrow canoe, with several people paddling. Their paddles dip and rise together, dip and rise together. Their boat cuts through the water like a knife through soft butter.

The Chumash call this canoe a tomol.

A tomol. Coming home to Limuw.

· · ·

A tomol is not like a plastic kayak or a metal rowboat. A tomol is made of wood. Long planks of redwood, carefully shaped and fitted together. The planks are sewn together with strong plant cord, and the seams are filled with black sticky pine tar so the water cannot get in.

A tomol is made by many people working together for a long time. When it is finished, it can carry paddlers across twenty miles of open water, from the mainland all the way to Limuw.

The Chumash people have been building tomols for thousands of years. Their parents taught them. Their grandparents taught their parents. Their great-great-grandparents taught their grandparents. All the way back, tomol after tomol after tomol.

· · ·

The blue bird watches the tomol come closer.

She can hear the paddlers singing now. A low song. Steady. Match the paddling. Dip — rise — dip — rise.

The tomol gets closer. Now she can see the paddlers’ faces. They look tired and happy. They have been paddling all night.

The sun is rising higher. The water sparkles.

The tomol slides onto the beach. The paddlers step out. Their feet sink a little into the wet sand. They turn and look at each other. One of them laughs.

They are here. They have crossed the twenty miles. They have come home to Limuw.

The beach they stand on has a name. It is called Xaxas. Tomols have been coming home to Xaxas for thousands of years.

Home to Xaxas.
Home to Limuw.

· · ·

Here is something I want you to know.

For a long time, the tomols did not come. There was a time when no one was paddling. The boats sat quiet on the beaches. The people who knew how to build them were not allowed to build them. The songs were not being sung.

But the Chumash people did not forget. They held the knowledge carefully inside them, like a little light in a cupped hand. They waited.

And then, in a year not so long ago, they built a tomol again. And they learned the songs again. And they paddled across the channel — all twenty miles — to Limuw.

And they landed on the beach. And they hugged each other. And they cried a little.

And since then, Chumash paddlers cross the channel to Limuw again, in their tomols, with their songs.

The tomols are coming back.
The tomols are still coming home.

· · ·

The blue bird watches it all from her oak tree.

She watches the paddlers pull the tomol up above the tide line. She watches them greet their family on the shore. She watches them sit down in the sand and drink water and rest.

She tilts her head.

Good paddlers. Good morning. Good boat.

She ruffles her blue feathers. She has acorns to plant. Things to announce. Opinions to share.

But first, for a little moment, she is quiet. She is watching. She is remembering.

This is her island. This is Limuw. And the tomol has come home.

On Limuw.

For the Teacher

About this story

The tomol is the Chumash plank canoe — a remarkable piece of boat-building that the Chumash (and their southern neighbors the Tongva) developed at least a thousand years ago, possibly much longer. Tomols were built from long planks of redwood (driftwood that floated south along the California coast), sewn together with plant-fiber cord, and sealed with yop, a mixture of pine pitch and naturally-occurring asphaltum. They could cross the twenty-mile channel between the mainland and Santa Cruz Island. They were made and paddled by members of a specialized group called the Brotherhood of the Tomol.

After Chumash communities were relocated to the mainland missions in the early nineteenth century, tomol-building and open-water paddling stopped. The Brotherhood disbanded in 1834. For over 140 years, no new tomol was built.

Then, in 1976, a small group of Chumash people and supporters built Helek (“peregrine falcon”) — the first new tomol in seven generations. Twenty-five years later, in 2001, a larger tomol named ’Elye’wun (“swordfish”) made the full crossing from the mainland to Santa Cruz Island. Since then, the crossing has taken place every year, usually in September. Chumash paddlers still cross the channel today. The story’s final movement — about the time when the tomols did not come, and then did — is a real history, and still unfolding.

The words in this story

Limuw LEE-moo the Chumash name for Santa Cruz Island. Means in the sea.

tomol TOH-mol the Chumash plank canoe. The boat in this story.

Xaxas KHAH-khahs a Chumash village on the north shore of Limuw, where the tomols came in. Today the place is called Prisoners Harbor on most maps.

If a child asks

“Why did the tomols stop?”

A gentle, age-appropriate answer: When people called missionaries came here a long time ago, they took the Chumash people from Limuw to live on the mainland. They did not let the Chumash speak their own language or do their own traditions. So the Chumash could not build or paddle tomols for a long time. An older child may want more detail, which you can handle as feels right.

“How did they remember how to build one?”

The Chumash people remembered in many ways. Elders told their children what they remembered. Some old notes and drawings were saved in archives. And when the time came to build a new tomol, people worked together, asking their elders, reading what was saved, and figuring out the rest by trying. Remembering is something people do together, carefully, for a long time.

“Can we see a tomol?”

Yes. The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum has tomols on display and is an excellent field trip. The Santa Ynez Chumash Museum & Cultural Center has a Tomol House in its design. Channel Islands National Park visitor center in Ventura also has tomol material. The annual crossing happens every fall and is celebrated publicly.

A note on care

This is the closing story of the book. It deliberately gathers up what the other stories have laid down: the jay returns as narrator, we see Limuw from the water, we hear the word Xaxas as the shore the boat comes home to, and tomol enters the children’s vocabulary. The story also does the book’s most careful piece of teaching — that there was a long silence, and then the tomols came back, and the Chumash are still here. Handle the silence briefly and move through it; the kids will remember the return.