I found a curious thing on Google maps recently. For the last few weeks, they’ve been labeling, quite substantially, a part of Newhall as “Takuyumam.”
Obviously, it’s something related to Native Americans. But unlike other parts of town with Native American names (Cashtuk, Chungyabit, etc), I’ve never heard the word “Takuyumam.”
Well it turns out all the Google links and map references to this place are based on something from the US Geologic Survey:
As you can see, the USGS page says Takuyumam was a Chumash Indian settlement.
Hold your horses USGS! Chumash? Really?
The Chumash are a people who inhabited mostly coastal southern and central California. Our Natives weren’t Chumash, in fact, little is known about them, we only know what others called them, the Tataviam (People of the Sun) or aliklik, which was a name derisively given to our natives by the Chumash because of the sound of their language.
So I checked out the 100 year old referenced book on Google Books and searched it for Takuyumam. No results. Then I searched for Newhall and found one reference to a place called “Kashiwe”, a “former Chumashan village near Newhall, Ventura County, California at a place now called Cuesta Santa Susana.”
Interesting, but a dead-end.
I searched SCVHistory.com and there are no results for Takuyumam either. So I hopped onto JStor and a few other academic indexing services, and none of them reference a place called Takuyumam.
So what’s the deal? Why is Google putting a big fat place marker on Newhall that relates to the Chumash when just about everything we know about the SCV indicates the Tataviam people lived here?
I think it’s probably a mistake. But it’s one mistake I’m going to have fun hunting down. Because I’m nerdy like that.
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