Those who remain live in the hills surrounding Tecate, often on ranchos at the end of barely visible dirt roads.

As the crow flies, their homes are little more than 40 miles from San Diego. But in reality, the residents at the end of the faded, dusty trails are a world away – descendents of the Kumeyaay Indians who have inhabited the region for centuries, they often still speak their native Kumeyaay language, gather plants for food and medicine as their ancestors did and work to pass on their culture to the next generation.

Yet despite their efforts, the Kumeyaay culture is rapidly becoming part of the past. “This is a process that’s been going on for the last couple of centuries and has been accelerated recently because of the development of cities and the need for people to get the services they can get in cities and because of the difficulty of surviving off the land the way people used to,” said San Diego State University graduate student Mike Wilken, whose has been studying the native people of Baja, California for three decades.

The story of the Kumeyaay Indians in the Tecate region is not unlike that of many Native Americans – their culture absorbed by the encroaching, modern world or forgotten by younger generations eager to blend in.

But in the case of the Kumeyaay in Tecate there is a binational effort underway to preserve the culture, which includes plans for a museum that is scheduled to open in late 2010.

A coalition of businesses, non-profits and academia has come together over the past four years to spearhead the museum project and raise the $600,000 needed for its design and construction. The partnership includes San Diego State University, the non-profit Camino Real Misonero de las Californias (CAREM), the non-profit Fundacion La Puerta and the Rancho La Puerta fitness resort.

“Our goal is to develop a museum where the general public and the community can learn about the original people of this region from the living descendants of those original inhabitants,” said Zella Ibanez, CAREM’s volunteer executive director. “This is a dream of the Kumiai. They really want a place where their culture can be passed down to future generations. Notice of their community has been a long time coming and so they really want this to happen.”

The museum also represents the culmination of years of research done by Wilken. For 30 years Wilken has been studying the cultural heritage of the native people of the Baja, California region. More recently, that effort has focused on defining the cultural landscape of the Kumeyaay in the Tecate area with the help of SDSU anthropology professor Lynn Gamble.

Together Wilken and Gamble have wandered down many of those dirt roads in the hills surrounding Tecate in order to gather the oral history of the Kumeyaay people and piece together the significance of the region’s landscape in the Kumeyaay history.
It was on one such trip that the idea for the museum began to take shape.

“We met with one Kumeyaay family that had a tremendous photo collection,” said Gamble. “You don’t really see photo collections like this – it dated back to the early 20th century and the woman who had these knew all the people’s names, and where the photos were taken.”

That meeting and the discovery of what Wilken described as a few “cultural authorities” – Kumeyaay elders who still speak the language and follow the traditional ways of life - inspired plans for a museum.

Several planning workshops have since been held between the Kumeyaay and all the partners in the museum effort. Initial plans for the museum include displays and exhibits that authentically depict the Kumeyaay way of life – including acorn processing, basket making, and Kumeyaay music. Oral histories will be part of the museum’s offerings, as will workshops to educate area youth and the public about Kumeyaay language and culture, Ibanez said.

Members of the partnership have gathered seed money for the project. San Diego State University has contributed $18,500 from the SDSU President’s Leadership Fund. Tecate’s department of tourism has also announced that it will contribute to the project. And the city of Tecate donated one acre of land for the museum to be built on. San Diego architect James Hubbell, who has built projects around the world, is designing the museum. Still, there is much to be done in order to make the museum a reality and meet the goal of opening in late 2010.

“This project is truly exciting because the Kumeyaay of Baja, California really don’t have a community museum,” said Gamble. “So this will really be significant and we are also involving the Kumeyaay from the very beginning, so it really is a collaboration.”

Those wishing to make donations to this project should contact Amy Carstensen or online donations can be made at: 
http://donate.icf-xchange.org/donate.php/historical

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