Restoring Water Ways

With origins tracing back to a San Diego-based Young Native Scholars program as early as 2000, the grassroots nonprofit Native Like Water endures as a uniquely positioned organization “curating cultural experiences through an Indigenous lens with a focus on cultural conservation and natural habitats,” says founder Marc Chavez. Supported by a culturally rich staff and advisory board of accomplished and interdisciplinary Indigenous scholars, Chavez continues years of local and global program directorship serving Indigenous youth—and now the general public as well. With different origins and destinations than typical adventure tourism, Native Like Water’s mission-driven journey challenges prevailing paradigms in personal development and team building, ocean recreation, conservation, and holistic wellness.

An emphasis on reconnection to culture shapes and informs Native Like Water’s work. Along with supporting Native American and related populations with scholarships and life advancement resources, the organization maintains a central focus on a sacred relationship to water in alignment with its name. Deeply ingrained throughout Native Like Water’s programs are “surf and food as medicine” concepts and experiences. By way of ocean-focused recreation and travel, beneficiaries reintegrate lifestyle practices that Western sciences and values have separated them from. Destinations include Panama, Hawai’i, Mexico, and Jamaica, as well as on Mat Kumeyaay (Kumeyaay Land, the hyper-developed coast in particular) in what is now known as San Diego and northern Baja California. Recent and exciting developments have included dialogue and activities with the World Surf League (WSL) and local Kumeyaay leader Dr. Stanley Rodriguez.

REINTEGRATION: TEK AND HOLISTIC WELLBEING

Native Like Water’s approach, emphasizing “biological sciences, native foods, ethnobotany, and coastal traditions,” is interdimensional. Their programming represents forms of experiential education and recreational therapy while also being a form of critical studies challenging typical academic silos that often confine biology, anthropology (which can sometimes misrepresent or exclude the very culture it’s meant to support), oceanography, and other disciplines to Western viewpoints. Instead, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is conveyed through hands-on activities and cosmology-oriented storytelling. Engagement is made personal and real in a program setting supported by an array of guest speakers that range from community-based leaders to distinguished academics.

The essential aspects of TEK acknowledge thematic elements and ways of:

• Knowing - How might a creation story explain the biodiversity or geography of an area?

• Doing - How might knowledge of animal life cycles lead to an abundant hunting season?

• Being - Which plants are medicinal and in what ways, empowering healers to support the vitality of their communities?

An important element of TEK is the recognition of each culture’s uniqueness while also a framing of widely applicable traits of Indigenous societies. A key link between people, place, and heritage in the context of TEK in Indigenous and indeed all studies of traditions is culturally significant foods.

TRADITIONAL FOODS NOURISHING MIND, BODY, SPIRIT, AND COMMUNITY

“Eating with the seasons—how would that affect you?” Chavez asks. Native Like Water goes to great efforts to include the foods of the First Nations and artisanal producers of the immediate locations where their retreats, exchanges, and other offerings are held. Ironically, accounting for the relatively abundant San Diego-area grassroots food system, such sourcing can still present challenges compared to Panama, mainland Mexico, and elsewhere. Native Like Water maintains programming and relationships with community members in these regions who still make their livings and feed their families from farming,
fishing, and gathering.

In the case of Native Like Water’s food-as-medicine programs in their partner countries and cultures—samples being Jamaica’s Rastafari Ital and Hawai‘ian Kānaka Maoli mana—food and the landscapes from which they come are host to spiritual power. Preparing and consuming unprocessed, seasonal, heritage foods is an edifying and nutritionally informative experience for the eater and understanding the context in which it is consumed. In the setting of Kumeyaay land and culture, Chavez says shawii, a staple dish made of acorn mush, is critical to seeking basic understanding of the Kumeyaay people, place, and their ancestral land in San Diego County and northern Baja.

A STORY OF RESTORATION

Amidst these distressing times are compelling stories of individuals, communities, and social movements. Examples include landback, a restoration of Indigenous land tenure through cocreation of ownership and management strategies congruent with principles central to Native Like Water and the lifeways they advocate for. Rosie Clayburn, Native Like Water alum (‘03) and Yurok Tribe cultural resources department director and tribal heritage preservation officer, was elected in 2022 to the Board of Directors of Parks California. Clayburn oversaw the development of the first tribally operated visitor center in California State Parks, Chah-pekw O’ Ket’-toh (Stone Lagoon) Visitor Center. Her tenure has seen additional momentous initiatives, including steps to remove Klamath River dam for the sake of its culturally critical and long-impacted salmon fishery. “[The dam removal] brings about a change to restore our river, to bring balance back into our world, and to bring health to our people,” says Clayburn.

DREAMS FOR THE FUTURE

Looking at past and present, Native Like Water’s programs persist today as they have for years, carrying tradition and community forward while stewarding big dreams for the future with a spirit of intercultural exchange founded on long-term and long-distance vision. Time and space are seen differently through Native Like Water’s ancient-future perspective, framing seasonal and cultural change as their outlook with allegories like whale migration and the spread of Polynesian cultures through tens of millions of square miles of Pacific Ocean. With this in mind, what is one of the biggest dreams of Native Like Water?

Beyond the new horizon of opening a portion of their programs to all adult participants, Native Like Water is eager to expand their relationship with the ocean as their classroom, and its devoted stewards as their teachers. With longstanding relationships with the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) and masterful program crew members, Native Like Water continues to impart ocean and leadership skills to youth participants. Their work goes toward building and using a Polynesian sailing canoe in the spirit of the Hōkūle‘a for journeys both local and afar. The Hōkūle‘a, completed in 1976 as a means of cultural revitalization for Kānaka Maoli (native persons), has since gone far beyond its original mission of relinking Hawai‘i and Tahiti using traditional navigation only. The canoe and sister vessels have continued their journeys around the globe, sailing over 150,000 miles and around the world multiple times while hosting esteemed crew members and guests from Indigenous nations and the United Nations, including secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who visited in 2016. Having served as icons for the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty, Hokule’a and its PVS fleet are approaching a 50th anniversary milestone. Their use of TEK celestial navigation to guide passages has proven valid in the realm of modern science. Hōkūle‘a most recently visited San Diego in November 2023 and was met with a warm reception from both the local Polynesian and Kumeyaay communities.

The weaving together of deep immersion in place, communal travel, authentic leadership, and teaching is ubiquitous among Indigenous cultures and markers of Native Like Water’s philosophy and programs. So too is the value of the Earth and its landscapes and biodiversity not solely as resources, but as relatives and kin. “Always have solid mentors...solid beacons of light. The Hōkūle‘a, in its name, has that,” says Chavez.

To care for those relatives, and their archetypal expressions at a planetary scale, is thusly relatable to this story:

In Kānaka Maoli culture’s Mālama Honua: to care for our Island Earth

In Kumeyaay culture’s Emuht Mohay: to care for the Earth

These ancient traditions and their practices, as relevant today as ever, precede and transcend the modern environmental movement that’s barely a century old. Native Like Water, their community of organizations and leaders, and network of place-based programs present opportunities to relearn how we gather, how we recreate, and how we eat. In our disintegrated present, few such valuable opportunities for this kind of restoration are at hand.

» nativelikewater.org/san-diego-so-california

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Editor’s Note

Dive deeper into this topic with these resources.

Read‍

Native Like Water (article)

VOL. 37/ISSUE 3 • Spring 2024

News from Native CA

» newsfromnativecalifornia.com

Watch

» HAAGUA, an Indigenous surf film

Explore

» Map of Kumeyaay place-names

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