Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation (Ventura Coastkeeper)

Background

The term “Chumash” refers to the Native population of what is today metropolitan Los Angeles is a contemporary ethnic designation. The hunter-gatherer predecessors of the present population “did not consider themselves part of a single group.” They numbered approximately 20,000 and occupied a coastal California territory from Malibu to Paso Robles and inland to the San Joaquin Valley. They spoke six distinct but related Indigenous languages and subsist primarily on marine resources. Their material culture was similar across the region with extensive trade between groups. ^{2 3 4}

The Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation is one of 11 Chumash nonprofits. Four of the remaining ten are museums or maritime institutes and the others serve as legal entities for Chumash bands not recognized by the federal government as tribes. The Santa Inez Band of Chumash Indians and the Tejon Indian Tribe are federally recognized tribes. The latter includes members of other tribes. ^{5 6 7}

Activities

The Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation focuses on promoting its version of Chumash culture and protecting and restoring the aquatic environment in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties with a goal of influencing environmental policy statewide. ⁸

Wishtoyo’s Chumash Village, located in Malibu, reconstructs a traditional Chumash village. Public tours and special K-12 school events demonstrate aboriginal Chumash activities of daily life. Religious ceremonies attributed to the hunting and gathering Chumash are performed at the site. Public events include dances by the Dolphin Dancers of the Santa Clara Valley River Chumash Turtle Clan and music composed and recorded by Wishtoyo in Smuwic, an extinct Indigenous language. ^{9 10}

Wishtoyo engages in litigation to mandate clean-up of waterways and to block commercial projects that it claims would endanger water quality and species diversity. Its challenges rely on the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. ^{1 11}

In 2012, Wishtoyo and Heal the Bay sued the City of Ventura over sewage discharges into the Santa Clara River Estuary, obtaining a federal consent decree to clean up the river. The cost of the project was initially pegged at $231 million but by 2023 had ballooned to $557 million. ¹²

The Center for Biological Diversity and Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation sued the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement in June 2024 for “unlawfully renewing” ExxonMobil offshore oil and gas leases in the Santa Barbara Channel. The suit seeks to end offshore fuel drilling in California alleging “irreparable damage to marine ecosystems and fisheries essential to Chumash lifeways” by an “aggressively colonialist fossil fuels industry.” It cites a 2015 ExxonMobil corroded pipeline rupture off the Santa Barbara coast which released 140,000 gallons of oil and caused the company to shutter operations. ^{13 14}

Wishtoyo was part of a coalition of organizations represented by the Environmental Defense Center that opposed ExxonMobil’s bid to truck millions of gallons of oil through Santa Barbara as a prelude to restarting three drilling platforms off the Santa Barbara coast and reactivating its processing facility. The company terminated its lawsuit against Santa Barbara County’s denial of the plan in February 2024. ¹⁵

Wishtoyo’s Ventura Coastkeeper program partners with California State University Channel Islands to conduct an ongoing water quality monitoring project certified by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. A team of scientists and college students record data on water quality and species habitats in Ventura County’s coastal watersheds. The data is analyzed at a university lab and used as the basis for fishing, swimming, and wildlife remediation plans. ^{16 17 18}

Opposition to Nuclear Energy

The Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation was a cosigner on an April 2021 letter to President Joe Biden that asked the administration to promote weather dependent wind and solar power systems and “end the fossil fuel era.” The letter also advised the president to “Phase out nuclear energy as an inherently dirty, dangerous and costly energy source.” ¹⁹

Nuclear power plants produce no carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, and from 1990 until 2021 accounted for 20 percent of American electricity production—the largest source of zero carbon electricity in the United States. ²⁰ An October 2018 proposal from The Nature Conservancy noted that zero-carbon nuclear plants produced 7.8 percent of total world energy output and recommended reducing carbon emissions by increasing nuclear capacity to 33 percent of total world energy output. ²¹ A 2020 analysis from Our World in Data reported that nuclear energy “results in 99.9% fewer deaths than brown coal; 99.8% fewer than coal; 99.7% fewer than oil; and 97.6% fewer than gas,” making it “just as safe” as wind and solar power production. ²² The U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that “nuclear energy produces more electricity on less land than any other clean-air source” and that it would require “more than 3 million solar panels to produce the same amount of power as a typical commercial reactor or more than 430 wind turbines.” ²³

Funding

According to its 2023 990 form, the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation reported a revenue of $1,855,950, expenses of $1,733,475, and total assets of $30,712,230. ²⁴

According to its 2022 990 form, the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation reported a revenue of $6,669,201, expenses of $1,533,930, and total assets of $29,574,511. ²⁵ That same year, the foundation received $438,346 in grants and contributions included $205,150 from Seventh Generation Advisors in “unrestricted support.” ²⁶

Leadership

Mati Waiya (Little Hawk) is a ceremonial leader of the Chumash Santa Clara River Turtle Clan and the founder and executive director of the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation. A lifelong resident of Ventura County, he attended Ventura College. Waiya ran his own construction company before assuming leadership of Wishtoyo. He sits on the board of the Center for Biological Diversity. ¹⁸

A 2019 Los Angeles Times article alleged that Mati Waiya’s claim to Chumash ancestry was unfounded. The Times’ review of historical records showed that Waiya’s forebears came from Mexico. The article also revealed that Wishtoyo Foundation employs a number of Waiya’s relatives and suggested that Wishtoyo is a vehicle for Waiya family enrichment. It quotes a member of the Barbareno/Ventureano Band of Mission Indians who characterized Waiya’s work as “’colonization of our culture for his own personal gain. We don’t get to weigh in on how he is interpreting our culture.’” The article also noted that millions in revenue from a legal settlement were to be applied to building a Chumash museum that had yet to be built and the purchase of a golf course for $5.5 million. ²⁷

Two University of Oregon anthropologists issued a rebuttal. They asserted that “cultural identity and Native affiliation should be determined by communities in negotiation with state and federal officials,” questioned the accuracy of historical records for determining descent, argued that no living Chumash are of fully Chumash ancestry, and noted that “attacks” such as that of Times follow “the marked success of one indigenous group or another, as well as litigation by native peoples trying to stop powerful political and economic interests.” ²⁸