Turbulent waves crashed on La Jolla Shores last Monday as a gray sky threatened more rain showers.
Inside, sheltered from the damp weather and seated at a fancily adorned table overlooking floor-to- ceiling windows, Louis Guassac stared wistfully out at the beach and talked passionately of the days when his ancestors lived in a village that rested where he sat.
“The Kumeyaay are coastal Indians ” they always have been,” said Guassac, a tribal consultant for the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, from the La Jolla Shores restaurant. “It’s who we are as a people, both spiritually and culturally. The most important thing is for us to reconnect to the water and find a way to preserve it and what’s in it.”
That’s where Mary Coakley comes in.
The La Jolla Shores resident, who is well known in the community for her work with the Kellogg Park comfort station, was at a La Jolla Historical Society meeting several months ago when a presentation by a Kumeyaay Indian turned her project ideas upside-down.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we’re building this without its foundation,” Coakley said, reflecting on the original project.
Before she gave Guassac a call and began collaborating with him, Coakley had been planning to install a 30-foot by 75-foot lithocrete “” or crushed glass “” map in the ground to depict the environmental resources found in the La Jolla Ecological Preserve, which spans the beach and miles off the coast.
Coakley’s initial goal was to teach others about the biological and ecological elements of the reserve, which includes several underwater canyons and many species of indigenous fish.
Learning of the Kumeyaay’s influence in the area, Coakley felt compelled to share the cultural significance of La Jolla Shores with the public as well, she said. With Guassac’s help, an Indian artist was commissioned to create murals, based on the Kumeyaay’s oral history, that will go on shower walls inside the Kellogg Park comfort station.
The drawings will include plaques that tell the Kumeyaay’s history, which hearkens back to the 18th century when the Spanish sailed into San Diego and began claiming land.
A plaque on the lower corner of the map will also display the history of Guassac’s ancestors, according to Coakley.
The Kumeyaay native also worked on a project at the U.S. Grant Hotel downtown depicting Kumeyaay culture and collaborated with author Mike Connolly Miskwish to compile a book of tribal drawings and stories that show the evolution of the tribe.
The large hardcover copy Guassac had with him contained words in the Kumeyaay language for ocean, mountains and desert ” the three main elements of the tribe’s existence, Guassac said.
His work with Florence Connolly Shipek, author of “Pushed into the Rocks,” and Patricia Masters, professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has involved generating ways to preserve many underwater sites along the coast that contain Kumeyaay artifacts such as clay pottery.
These remains are often removed by scuba divers who are unaware of the cultural value such items hold to historians and people within the tribes, Guassac said. It is also illegal to remove any items found on the ocean floor more than 3 miles off the coast, he added.
A map that Guassac has with him shows the gradual migration of his people from their villages along the coastline of San Diego ” up as far as Los Angeles and down into Tijuana ” inland to a secluded portion of the Laguna Mountains.
The tribe ” especially the Sycuan band, which is providing additional funding for the project ” is trying to inform its younger generation of their ties to the ocean and the culture and lifestyle that once belonged to their ancestors, and Coakley’s project is one vehicle to do that, Guassac said.
“It’s an educational thing,” he said. “It lets people know a history of the culture and that our people were here and they are still here with us.”
Coakley agrees and hopes the project will open people’s eyes to a culture that she admits she had not known about until the historical society meeting. Another vision she has for the project is for teachers to bring students to the comfort station and map for educational field trips, she said.
“We are both learning from each other, and it’s really enriching,” Coakley said of the new partnership.
“We are really hoping this is the start of a long relationship that’s going to be maintained even after we are gone,” Guassac said.
For more information about the map project, contact Coakley, (619) 840-0250, or visit www.lajollashoresmap.com.