Cupeños

Like other Native peoples, the Cupeños of southern California possess rich oral traditions. For them, these stories are records of their past. Cupeños have passed down these narratives for generations, thereby explaining their cultural beliefs, relationships to divine beings, and migration patterns. One account in particular recalls the Cupeño settlement of their homeland. Long ago in the mists of time, Mukat, a deity, guided his [Page 186]people, the Cupeños, from the north into a mountain valley in what is now northern San Diego County. This was sometime after Temayawit, another god, had an argument with Mukat and departed for the underworld. Mukat told the people that the land was theirs and that they should care for it and be happy. The fact that Mukat led the Cupeños to their homelands near modern-day Warner Springs, California, is highly important. It reveals that Cupeños could claim their lands by divine sanction. Mukat himself approved this first migration in Cupeño memory.

As far as can be determined, the Cupeños are actually the descendants of at least three Native peoples in southern California. Jane H. Hill, noted expert on Cupeño language and culture, asserts that the first Cupeños “were a lineage of the Mountain Cahuilla who had moved south from the area around Soboba, [California].” The Cupeño language belongs to the Cupan group of the Takic subfamily of the Uto-Aztecan linguistic family, the same group to which the Cahuilla language belongs. These early Cahuilla peoples migrated into northern San Diego County and eventually intermarried with members of two other local indigenous groups, the Kumeyaays and Luiseños. The Spanish eventually called them Cupeños, meaning “the people who live at Cupa,” the name of their main village. However, the Cupeños referred to themselves as Kuupangaxwichem, or “the people who slept here.”

The location of their primary community, Cupa, is significant. Cupa lay near some of the indigenous trade routes that crisscrossed Native California. These trails linked Cupeños commercially to their neighboring relatives, the Cahuilla, Kumeyaays, and Luiseños, as well as to various societies along the Colorado River and other Native Americans in California. As a result of trade, Cupeños obtained such items as dried fish, otter skins, shell beads, salt, pottery, and corn. In addition to trade, these roads served other purposes. Along these routes, Cupeños interacted and intermarried with other local populations, received news and other information, exchanged cultural ideas, and occasionally fought. One of the major results of these associations is that Cupeños developed into a sharp and savvy business people.

The lives of Cupeños changed forever after the Spanish invasion of California in 1769. Cupeños first viewed a Spanish exploring party in 1795. According to one oral tradition, they eventually heard that Spaniards “came from the water, and it is said that for that reason they named them Ocean People.” These fair-complected foreigners soon established a mission system along the California coast. Some Cupeños visited the San Luis Rey and San Diego missions, likely out of curiosity or perhaps to conduct trade. Once missionaries baptized Cupeños and other local Native Americans, they refused to permit them to leave the missions. Cupeños living in the missions encountered unfamiliar animals and learned new skills, but they also suffered untold atrocities, abuse, and exposure to deadly diseases. After the secularization of the missions during the 1830s, those Cupeños who survived, almost without exception, returned to their homelands.

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