In a grainy, undated video, a camera focuses on an elderly man with braided gray hair and a red headband festooned with feathers. The video, Grandfather Speaks, claims to feature the teachings of the “last full-blooded Chumash” in California — Semu Huaute.
In the video, Semu talks about wanting to build an intertribal camp to teach people about “Mother Earth,” describing what later became known as Red Wind. Semu, however, was actually born Paul Olivas and grew up in a working-class Spanish-Mexican family around Ventura, California. Despite his claims, he and his family never “headed for the hills” to avoid the genocide brought on by settlers in early California.
“Right now there’s only quarter-bloods and half-bloods and a lot of them that say they are. All of a sudden it’s fashionable to be an Indian,” he says in the recording.
According to Brian Haley, a professor of anthropology at State University of
New York at Oneonta, Olivas descended from California’s early colonists. “Semu” was known simply as Paul until the 1960s, when the Los Angeles Times ran a story in which he claimed he was the last full-blooded Chumash from the Santa Barbara Channel Islands. He said he didn’t speak English until he was 9 and was an intertribal medicine man for the Laguna Tribe in Barstow.
The story of Olivas’ transformation into “Grandfather Semu” is a common, if extreme, example of how American Indian ethnic fraud, aka “pretendianism,” has become commonplace in the United States. This phenomenon intensified in the 20th century on California’s Central Coast — the original homelands of the Chumash people — motivated by a complex mix of a desire for attention, a need for cultural identity and the appetite for material gain.
In California, the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash remains the only federally recognized Chumash tribal nation in the state. Indigenous legitimacy in California is determined by mission and other Spanish era records. Chumash groups that are not federally recognized include: the Northern Chumash Tribal Council (NCTC) and the Coastal Band of Chumash Nation, the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash (YTT) and three bands of Barbareño Chumash. YTT and two of the Barbareño bands can most accurately document their Chumash ancestry and sustained culture through historic records.
Both the YTT and the Barbareño Ventureño Band document their ancestry through historic records. But according to Haley’s research on the NCTC and the Coastal Band, most of their members lack documented Chumash ancestry. He has spent decades chronicling what he calls “neo-Chumash people,” people who may or may not have actual Chumash heritage but who did not identify as Chumash until the 1970s. Haley acknowledges that Olivas had some Chumash ancestry but was several generations removed. He was certainly not the last full-blooded Chumash.
Even though Paul Olivas aka Semu passed away in 2004 and Red Wind is no longer a “Chumash” gathering place, some still regard him as legitimately Chumash despite the evidence that contradicts his claims. People who falsely claim Chumash and Native ancestry often organize as nonprofit groups that make millions of dollars from conservation work and from “cultural monitoring,” which involves consulting firms that ensure that artifacts and human remains uncovered by development are handled appropriately.
“I did not know anything at all about being Indian, nothing, and so I was buying everything that they were telling me.”
A REMOTE 200-ACRE compound deep in the Los Padres National Forest about 20 miles outside Santa Margarita in San Luis Obispo County, the Red Wind community was inseparable from the counterculture movement. Semu garnered praise from Marlon Brando and musicians like the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, Jackson Browne and the Eagles, who held fundraising shows for Red Wind. One of Semu’s goals, he said, was to show the world “how real Native people lived.”
The compound was organized under the title Red Wind Foundation in 1972. A tax filing from 2013 describes it as a registered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation whose primary exempt purpose is “religion.”
Penny Pierce Hurt, a tribal council member and cultural preservation administrator for the Xolon Salinan, another Indigenous tribe whose ancestral homelands are in the San Antonio Valley and on the Central Coast, said she was initially drawn to Red Wind because she hoped it would help her connect with her Native identity. She was adopted at birth and only connected with her Salinan father as an adult. He told her about her Native heritage.
“I did not know anything at all about being Indian, nothing, and so I was buying everything that they were telling me,” Pierce Hurt recalled. She remembered a conversation with Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto, a Barbareño Chumash woman revered as the daughter of the last fluent Chumash speaker, who sat her down and set her straight.
“You need to stop hanging out with the people you’re hanging out with,” Pierce Hurt remembered her saying. “She said, ‘You are who you say you are, and you’re giving credibility to these people, even by sitting at the table with them.’”
Pierce Hurt was drawn to Semu by what she thought was his authentic Native culture, even though it wasn’t her own. Looking back now, she understands that Semu wasn’t who he said he was.
Another firsthand account, described in the book Who Gets to be Indian, called the camp a “sex cult,” alleging that Semu fled after being accused of sexually abusing an 8-year-old girl.
Others had a more positive image of Red Wind, citing the school it established.
IN THE 1970S, the environmental movement was ramping up. Word that a Chumash sacred site along the Gaviota Coast in southwest Santa Barbara would be desecrated by a proposed LNG (liquified natural gas) facility sparked an intense response in 1978. This encouraged the growth of cultural monitoring, which became a lucrative industry that contributed to ethnic fraud in the region.
Development in California is regulated by several state laws. Both AB 52, signed in 2014, and 2004’s SB18 require public agencies to consult with tribes to comply with the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Whenever burials are unearthed, the laws ensure that human remains and other burial objects are properly and legally handled.
The laws’ implementation is assisted by the state’s Native American Heritage Commission, which maintains a tribal contact list and a “most likely descendant” (MLD) list that developers are required to consult. Those on the list can compete for cultural monitoring contracts, which can result in a lot of money.
According to ProPublica’s nonprofit tracker, the NCTC received $1.36 million
in revenue in fiscal year 2024.
Problems arise due to lax commission rules that enable groups and individuals without accurate documentation of California Indian ancestry to get on the MLD list and establish cultural monitoring firms. The problem is further complicated by the fact there is no law preventing a group from calling itself a tribe. This is how groups like the Coastal Band and NCTC can claim to be tribes despite most members’ lack of documented tribal heritage; the cultural monitoring firms sometimes refer to themselves as “tribes” or “tribal councils.”
High Country News reached out to both the Coastal Band and NCTC for comment. Ernest Houston, a member of the Coastal Band who serves NCTC as a tribal cultural resource monitor, vigorously defended both tribes’ Native ancestry.
The tribal homeland of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini (YTT) in San Luis Obispo County is on the Heritage Commission’s contact list. YTT Chairwoman Mona Olivas Tucker said that publicly available genealogical records prove that NCTC’s founder, the late Fred Collins, had no Chumash ancestry. Yet NCTC benefited from his false claims. Collins’ alleged ancestry was the subject of a defamation suit he filed against the Salinan Heritage Preservation Association, which was ultimately dismissed in 2017 under anti-SLAPP regulations.
The NCTC is currently in the process of purchasing over 200 acres known as the Dos Pueblos Ranch — named for two Chumash village sites — for $62 million. The purchase is fiercely contested by the Barbareño Chumash, who claim to be the land’s true documented descendants, and the YTT community is supporting their efforts to stop the sale.
“The people who don’t have true ancestry will often say that they’re offended to even be asked who their ancestors are,” said Mona Olivas Tucker.
“I’m not offended to be asked who my ancestors are. I have no reason to keep them hidden, but when somebody tells you, ‘You shouldn’t even ask me that question,’ it always makes me wonder what they are hiding.”
Today, the Red Wind property is still used by religious organizations. During the recent Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, a group of Spanish-speaking worshippers held an evangelical revival there. The property still contains vestiges of its heyday
as an intertribal camp.
“I’m not offended to be asked who my ancestors are. I have no reason to keep them hidden, but when somebody tells you, ‘You shouldn’t even ask me that question,’ it always makes me wonder what they are hiding.”
“Looking back, I realized that they were using this as a vehicle to … monitor and make money off of it. And I think that’s when they all started (to claim Chumash heritage),” said Pierce Hurt, emphasizing the lasting impact Semu’s legacy has had on Native communities.
In the 1970s, the floodgates were opened for people without verifiable tribal heritage to claim tribal identities. Nativeness had become an exploitable commodity. Red Wind attracted a variety of people, some as opportunistic as Semu and others who were genuinely spiritually hungry. Today, people pretending to be Native continue to exploit a system that still lacks serious checks and therefore accountability, including universities, artists and writers, and, in California, even people who claim to protect Indigenous sacred spaces.
Allison Herrera is a 2025-2026 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a former senior reporter for APM Reports. Her Native ties are to her Xolon Salinan tribal heritage.
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This article appeared in the May 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The dubious legacy of a psuedo-Native community.”
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