A DAY TO CELEBRATE CULTURE
Native Americans embrace sense of community during annual Indigenous Peoples Day event at Safari Park
Echos of California Native bird singers could be heard throughout the day at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park on Monday as the community celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day during the park’s third annual celebration.
Held in partnership with the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians — the people who originally inhabited the land where the park lies — the event was launched in 2021 as a way to share more Native American history and culture with park visitors.
Monday’s celebration included the telling of the creation story, performances by bird singers and dancers, a 1.2-mile hike through the park’s biodiversity reserve and an Indigenous artisans exhibition. Park vendors also sold food specials like prickly pear lemonade, prickly pear lemon bar with mesquite crumble, and pork belly skewers with prickly pear barbecue glaze to highlight the traditional Kumeyaay food staple.
Johnny Bear Contreras is a San Pasqual Band tribal elder, artist and cultural committee member who works with leaders at the Safari Park to organize the Indigenous Peoples Day event. Since launching the annual celebration in 2021, Contreras said he’s been excited to see how it continues to grow.
“I’m just running into more and more family every year — more relatives and folks that are coming from further distances — and I think everyone’s coming with the same intent to share stories, share a good time,” he said.
Stanley Rodriguez from the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel told parts of the Kumeyaay creation story during the celebration. He said Indigenous Peoples Day is an effort to re-educate the community about how forced assimilation and genocide impacted Native communities throughout California and beyond.
The California State Library reports that at the time of the first known European contact in 1542, there were an estimated 350,000 Indigenous people living in presentday California.
By the end of the California mission system in 1834, that number had dropped to 150,000 people due to European diseases and abuse by some of the Spanish padres and soldiers. In 1880, there were only 18,000 Indigenous people left in the state following an effort to exterminate the Native population by gold-seek