I grew up in Ojai, California. The valley is narrow and east-west, which means the light comes in at an angle in the afternoon that turns the Topa Topa bluffs a color that is not quite red and not quite gold. I hiked those ridges for years — up the Pratt Trail into the backcountry, out into the Sespe Wilderness along the creek, through the Cuyama hills in deer season with my father. I thought I knew that landscape well. I knew its trails and its weather and the particular sound the Sespe makes in different seasons.
I did not know its names.
When I got to UC Santa Barbara and encountered the work of Chumash specialists, I began to understand that the landscape I had grown up in was not a blank terrain that European settlers had named. It was already full — full of accumulated meaning, of specific histories, of a cosmological system in which every ridge and creek and sea passage had a name and a set of relationships and a place in a larger order. The Chumash had been in that landscape for thousands of years before the missions arrived. They had named everything. They had organized the world carefully and in great detail. The missions did not erase that. The missions drew over it.
That distinction — drawing over, rather than erasing — is the frame that holds all the stories in this collection together.
In graduate school I studied Chinese religion. I sat in the Special Collections reading room at UCSB and read Daoist ritual texts from the Fujian coast of China — documents from the tenth century, preserved in the great Daoist Canon. Among them was a dispatch text dated 975 CE. It was a short document, efficient and bureaucratic in its language: it named a demon, issued an order, set a deadline. The demon was the small green frog of the Fujian wetlands, identified as the cause of malaria. The authority issuing the order was the new Song dynasty's Bureau of Religious Affairs.
I sat with that document for a while before I understood what I was looking at. The indigenous peoples of coastal Fujian — the Min-Yue, described in Han Chinese texts as the tattooed people — had venerated the frog as an ancestral figure for centuries. The frog appeared on their bronze drums, in their burial goods, tattooed on their foreheads. The frog was not a symbol to them. The frog was their lineage, their connection to the dead, their ancestral claim to the landscape.
The dispatch was not a medical document. It was an administrative one. It announced, in the most authoritative language available — ritual language, bureaucratic language, the language that commanded both demons and government subordinates — that what they held was now reclassified. It had become a public health problem. The new administration would manage it accordingly.
It was the same move I had watched the missions make on the Chumash landscape. Same logic, different continent, nine hundred years apart.
I went to China to find the mountain where the text had been issued. I went three times, over several years, in different capacities. On the first trip I found the old shrine: empty niches, smoke-blackened walls, fresh oranges on the floor in front of the bare altars. Someone had been there that morning. The relationship between the worshipper and the place does not require the official images to still be present. It requires the place, and the practice, and the willingness to bring the oranges anyway.
On the second trip I found the official temple — the Ming-dynasty stele, the lacquered statues, the government-recognized version of the history. On the third trip I came for the festival and watched several hundred people do several different things simultaneously in the same courtyard: pray, eat, set off firecrackers, manage offerings, argue about parking. The official history and the older practice were both present, running on parallel tracks, each largely invisible to the other.
That parallel-track quality — the old layer and the new layer occupying the same ground simultaneously — is what these stories are trying to show.
The stories in this collection begin closer to home. They begin in the kelp forest — with a sheephead fish named Sholol moving through the underwater world of Limuw, the island the Spanish called Santa Cruz. They rise above the water with a pelagic cormorant named Wito watching the channel from the sea cliffs. They move inland with the Chumash people of the island itself — the gathering at the valley, the 'antap knowledge that organizes the sky and the sea and the obligations between them, the mission visible at the edge of the story's frame. They cross the channel and walk the trade route toward the mountains above Ojai. By the time the collection reaches 10th-century Fujian, the reader has already met the pattern: they have seen it in the kelp, in the cliff, in the valley where the grass was known by name, in the river corridor where a girl is walking toward a world that is in the process of renaming itself around her.
I now live in Monterey, California. The mission is here. The archaeology is here, beneath the mission and beneath the parking lots and beneath the tourist infrastructure. The Rumsen Ohlone people were here for a very long time before Portolá arrived and the world was renamed. The renaming is not complete. It never is.
Each story in this collection approaches the same problem from a different place and time.
The tools we use, named and defined.
Every story in this collection is set at a moment of remapping.
A Spanish expedition arrives on the Chumash coast and the landscape acquires new names. A Song dynasty Bureau of Religious Affairs issues a dispatch and an ancestral animal is reclassified as a demon. A mission is built on ground that was already understood, in detail, by the people living there. The names change. The official record reflects the new names. The new names are then taught as the real names — the original names become footnotes, exotic spellings, historical curiosities.
This is remapping: not the erasure of what was there, but the drawing of a new administrative layer over it, thick enough to obscure the original terrain from newcomers and from the official record, not thick enough to actually replace it. The Chumash continued to use Chumash place names after the missions renamed everything. Min-Yue community practice continued alongside the Song dynasty's ritual administration. The fresh oranges kept arriving at the empty niches.
Remapping is the frame because it describes accurately what happened in the places these stories are set — and because it keeps the original terrain visible. If we say the Spanish replaced Chumash culture, we make it too easy to think that Chumash culture is gone. If we say they drew over it, we keep open the question of what is still legible underneath.
These stories try to stand in the gap between the two layers. They are not nostalgic for what was lost, though loss is real. They are interested in what persists, and in what it costs the people who carry both layers at once. The fish carries the old world in its body without knowing it is doing so. The cormorant watches the channel from the same rocks it has always watched. The ritual priest performs the dispatch and maintains the back-garden altar in the same compound on the same day. The girl walks the trade route toward the mountains and does not yet know that the route will soon be a different kind of road.
These stories are grounded in real documents.
The frog dispatch in the China story (Qū Háma Zhàng Wén, 975 CE) is a real document, preserved in the Daoist Canon (HY 1456, 4.7b–13a). The ceremonial paddle organization at the center of the California coastal stories was a real institution. The Channel Islands archaeology is real. The Chumash place names in these stories come from peer-reviewed scholarship by researchers who worked with Chumash community members and consulted oral tradition alongside archival sources. Where we cite specific documents we have read them. Where we speculate we say so.
Working with primary sources also means working with their limits. Official documents were created by officials, and officials wrote down what was useful to officials. A Chinese bureaucratic dispatch text tells us what the Song administration wanted to accomplish; it does not tell us what the Min-Yue communities thought about the frog being declared a demon. A mission record tells us what the padres wanted to track; it does not tell us what was happening in the rancherias at night. A 19th-century ethnographer's field notes tell us what the ethnographer could see and was allowed to see; they do not tell us what was kept private.
The gap between what the document records and what actually happened is not empty. It is full of everything the document was not designed to capture. Paying attention to that gap is how these stories try to be honest. In the China story, a government observer sits on the temple steps at the end of the evening and names what he will not write in his report. In the California stories, what is not in the mission record is present in the landscape — in the plant names, the fishing grounds, the trade routes, the knowledge of which stars govern the crossing.
Naming a place is an act of claiming it. This is not a metaphor. The renaming of indigenous landscapes was a deliberate administrative strategy: assign Spanish names to Chumash villages, register them in mission records under those names, and the official history of the place begins when the mission arrives. Everything before that is prehistory — by definition, outside the record, outside the claim.
The stories in this collection use indigenous place names where they are known and verifiable. The Chumash name for Santa Cruz Island is Limuw. The harbor the Spanish called Puerto de la Limpia Concepción is the place the Chumash called Kaxas. We use those names because they are the accurate names — the names that encode the actual history of the place, which is much longer than the mission record.
Where indigenous names are not yet confirmed — where the scholarship has not yet produced a reliable form, or where the community's preference for public use is not yet known — these stories use placeholder notation and acknowledge the gap rather than substituting a colonial name or inventing something.
The same principle applies to personal names. The characters in these stories are named in the languages appropriate to who they are: Chumash names for Chumash people, Hakka names for Hakka priests, Song dynasty names for Song dynasty officials. Where we do not have confirmed names we use working names and say so. The ceremonial paddling society at the center of the California stories is called the 'Aqtumush — that is its actual name. Calling it the "Brotherhood of the Tomol," as earlier scholarship did, is the archive's convenience, not the institution's identity.
The archive tends to record gender in binary administrative categories, which is not the same as saying that binary gender was the lived reality of the people being recorded. Daoist religious practice has documented traditions of gender-nonconforming practitioners — people whose ritual roles placed them outside the categories that civil administration used to organize the population. Indigenous Chumash social organization included roles and identities that do not map cleanly onto European categorical systems. These are historical facts, not modern projections.
Where a character in these stories holds a gender identity that does not fit the administrative binary, we use the pronouns appropriate to that identity rather than the pronouns the official record would have used. Lín Qīng Měi, the Hakka ritual priest in the China story, uses they/them pronouns because they are gender-nonconforming — a category with genuine historical precedent in Daoist religious life. The California stories include characters whose identities the mission system could not accommodate and did not try to understand. This is not an anachronism; it is a correction of the archive's systematic omission of the people it found inconvenient to classify.
These stories follow LGBTQ-inclusive language guidelines throughout. This is not a political stance imported into historical material. It is a recognition that the people who were actually there were more diverse than the records allowed, and that using the archive's categorical limitations as our own is a choice with consequences.
There is a scene near the end of the China story in which the government observer, Chén Míng Huī, sits on the temple steps and lists what he will not write in his report. He names his omissions. His report will be accurate — it will record what happened, in the form the Bureau requires. The mountain will keep its own record. The gap between the two is the story.
This is also the methodological situation of these stories. We know what the archive contains. We can see the edges of what the archive was designed not to record. We cannot fully recover what was there. We can be honest about that.
Honest uncertainty looks like this: naming what we know and how we know it. Flagging speculation as speculation. Not filling gaps with confident invention and passing it off as history. Treating the absence in the record as evidence of the archive's limits rather than evidence that nothing was there.
The Chumash ceremonial knowledge in these stories is real to the extent that scholarship has made it accessible and community members have authorized its sharing. Where it has not been authorized or verified, these stories work around the edges rather than inventing a center. What is shown of 'antap practice is what is publicly known. What is kept private in the story is kept private because it was and is private in practice. These are not arbitrary decisions. They are attempts to be a respectful guest in a living tradition, rather than a tourist with a camera.
Dave was born and raised in Ojai, California, and spent time on and around Santa Cruz Island through his association with the Santa Cruz Island Club, which ran hunting and tourist trips to the island during the 1970s and 1980s — an early and formative encounter with the landscape that became central to the California stories in this collection.
He studied at Ventura College before attending UC Santa Barbara, where he met Johnny Flynn, a Chumash specialist then teaching at UCSB, whose work shaped the direction of his research. While at UCSB, Dave received a BA in Chinese and an MA in Religious Studies. His Chinese and religious studies training took him to China during graduate school, where he made the fieldwork trips behind the story Áo Fēng — finding the old shrine on the side road, attending the festival, standing in front of the Ming stele and reading the official history of a place that had a much longer unofficial one.
He now lives in Monterey, California, again surrounded by the layered history of a place where the official record and the older record occupy the same ground. The mission is here. The Rumsen Ohlone archaeology is beneath the mission and beneath the parking lots. The renaming is recent, historically speaking, and incomplete.
These stories would not exist without the teachers who made them possible.
At UC Santa Barbara: Professor Chauncey Goodrich — whose course on Chinese mythology was the first door. The question he put to us about how a civilization narrates its own origins became a question I have not stopped asking. His scholarship on early Chinese thought gave me the tools to read primary texts carefully and skeptically. That single course opened the larger field of comparative religion for me, and everything in this collection follows from that opening.
Dr. Alan Grapard — one of the most influential scholars of Japanese religious history of his generation — taught the combination of rigorous textual scholarship and unflinching attention to power that shapes this collection's methodology. His work includes Japan's Ignored Cultural Revolution (1984), The Protocol of the Gods: A Study of the Kasuga Cult in Japanese History (University of California Press, 1992), and Mountain Mandalas: Shugendo in Kyushu (Bloomsbury, 2016).
Dr. Ron Egan's scholarship on Song dynasty literature and aesthetics shaped the China story's approach to reading official and unofficial texts together. His works include The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1984), Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Harvard University Asia Center, 1994), The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), and The Burden of Female Talent: The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014).
Dr. William Powell's translation and study of Chan Buddhist texts opened the question of how religious authority travels through texts, and what gets lost in the translation. His work includes The Record of Tung-shan (Kuroda Institute / University of Hawaii Press, 1986).
Dr. Pai, Dr. Du, Xu Laoshi, Wang Laoshi, and Huang Laoshi taught the language without which the primary texts would have remained inaccessible. Johnny Flynn opened the door to the Chumash material and to an understanding of what it means to work with a living tradition rather than an archived one.
Thank you.
This collection is a living document. The languages, place names, ceremonies, and histories represented here are still held by living communities, and what I have been able to recover is a fraction of what was there. I welcome corrections, additions, and better sources. I welcome help from scholars, community members, and descendants who know more than I do. If you have something to add — a better place name, a more accurate translation, a source I missed, a community's preference for how they are named — please reach out. These fragments of lost charts are worth piecing together carefully, together.
The Chumash place names in these stories have been checked against: Perry, Jennifer L., et al. "Traditional Chumash Place Names in Channel Islands National Park." California Archaeology 4.1 (2012): 93–119. Where names remain unconfirmed or where community authorization for public use is uncertain, they are flagged as placeholders. We welcome corrections.
The Daoist primary texts in the China story are drawn from the Dàozàng (Daoist Canon) as surveyed in Boltz, Judith Magee. A Survey of Taoist Literature: Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, 1987. The dispatch text (Qū Háma Zhàng Wén, HY 1456, 4.7b–13a) is dated 975 CE and is real.
For teachers, students, and readers who want the scholarly apparatus behind the stories.