Some people remember a culture. Others carry it.

Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto belongs unmistakably to the latter category. To encounter her—even briefly — is to encounter a living thread that runs from the deep past of this coastline into its uncertain present.

Years ago, through a friendship with one of her daughters, I had the opportunity to spend a little time in Ygnacio-De Soto’s presence.

I did not interview her formally, nor sit with her as a student. But it was immediately clear that I was near someone whose life mattered far beyond the moment.

She carried herself without spectacle or self-importance, yet everything about her radiated consequence. She was not performing history. She was history — alive, thinking, choosing.

To grasp the significance of Ygnacio-De Soto’s life, one must first understand how close the Chumash people came to cultural erasure.

California’s colonial history was not merely violent; it was systematically silencing. Indigenous languages were punished out of children. Traditions were framed as shameful. Survival often required disappearance.

By the early 20th century, Chumash languages stood at the edge of extinction.

The survival story begins several generations earlier with Ygnacio-De Soto’s great-grandmother, Luisa Ygnacio, who in 1913 began working with John Peabody Harrington, the obsessive and often difficult ethnolinguist employed by the Smithsonian Institution’s then-Bureau of American Ethnology.

Harrington devoted his life to documenting Indigenous languages before they vanished, producing more than 1 million pages of phonetic notes.

His methods were idiosyncratic and his personality notorious — but without his work, the Chumash linguistic record would be gravely diminished.

Harrington’s collaboration continued across three generations of Ygnacio women: from Luisa Ygnacio to her daughter, Lucretia García, and then to Lucretia’s daughter, Mary Yee.

By the time Harrington worked with Yee, their collaboration had become so sustained that they corresponded in Chumash itself.

After Yee retired in 1954, she worked with Harrington nearly every day, developing an analytic understanding of grammar and structure that effectively made her a linguist in her own right.

Ygnacio-De Soto grew up in that household — the last in which Chumash was spoken as a first language. She has recalled believing, as a child, that she might be the only Chumash person left in the world.

The stories she heard nightly were not quaint folktales. They were serious narratives — of bears, tricksters, shapeshifters — encoding ecological knowledge, moral instruction and survival wisdom refined over millennia.

Storytelling, for the Chumash, was never entertainment alone. It was pedagogy.

When Yee died in 1965, the last first-language speakers of Chumash languages were gone.

For many Indigenous communities, that moment marked the end. Languages died quietly. Silence settled in.

But Ygnacio-De Soto did not let that happen here. She remembered. And remembering, she understood, carried responsibility.

That responsibility found a crucial partner in John R. Johnson, curator of anthropology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

Johnson’s scholarship — grounded in mission records, archaeology, linguistics and genetics — has been distinguished by something too rare in academic work: reciprocity.

His decades-long collaboration with Ygnacio-De Soto has been built on trust, shared authority and sustained relationship.

Together, they co-created 6 Generations: A Chumash Family History, a documentary that traces the Ygnacio lineage across time and upheaval.

The film, which won Best Film at The Archaeology Channel International Film Festival in 2012, is not simply about ancestry. It is about continuity under pressure — how a people remain themselves while adapting to worlds not of their making.

Ygnacio-De Soto’s work has never been confined to scholarship. In 2005, she transformed the Sugar Bear story — told to her repeatedly by her mother — into a children’s book she also illustrated.

It was one more act in a lifelong project: ensuring that what her mother preserved would not end with her.

The ripple effects continue. Ygnacio-De Soto’s nephew, James Yee, is pursuing a doctorate in Chumash linguistics. Community members participate in cultural circles reviving basketry, traditional foods and land-based practices.

In 2023, Ygnacio-De Soto led a cultural burn at UC Santa Barbara’s North Campus Open Space — the first traditional fire management practice in the region in more than two centuries.

That same year, she was named grand marshal of Santa Barbara’s Old Spanish Days Fiesta parade, the first Chumash elder ever so honored.

As she rode along Cabrillo Boulevard — past Syuxtun, the ancestral village of her great-great-grandmother, Maria Ygnacio — she made a point that cut through symbolism.

“I’m not going symbolic,” she said. “I’m going Ygnacio.”

The distinction matters. The Ygnacio family — now numbering in the hundreds — includes Chumash, Chinese, Mexican, English, Norwegian, Danish, Filipino, French and Italian ancestry.

Ygnacio-De Soto’s stepfather was Henry Foo Yee. Their survival depended not on cultural purity, but on adaptation, intermarriage and strategic navigation of multiple worlds.

This is California’s real history, not the romanticized one.

What Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto has preserved is not a frozen artifact. It is a living inheritance — capable of change, anchored in memory and accountable to future generations.

Harrington documented. Johnson interpreted. Yee taught. But Ygnacio-De Soto has been the essential bridge: the one who heard the language spoken, who carries the stories in her body, and who refused to let them die with her.

The Chumash are still here. Their language is being spoken again. Their stories are being told.

And because of Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto, the deep history of this place remains legible to those willing to listen.