@alexnazaryan
A VINE DISTINCTION: Tara Gomez grows grapes on land that, after more than a century of dispossession, is once more owned by the Chumash tribe.
BENNY HADDAD
LONG BEFORE they first had contact with Europeans, the Chumash people occupied 7,000 square miles of exceptionally fertile land near what is today Santa Barbara. The conquest and settlement of California, first by Spain and then the United States, hemmed in the Chumash, making them secondary citizens on a land they thought had been granted to them by the gods. In 1901, the tribe was confined to 127 acres on the Santa Ynez Reservation. For most of the 20th century, that reservation, like most others across the nation, was a nearly invisible ghetto where Native Americans languished.