Paintings and Stories by J. Michael Walker ♦ February 29 — September 7
Kinkingna - A virtual broken heartbeat, painstakingly repaired
Kinkingna (Portrait of a Tongva Woman)
2007
Sumi ink on polyvinyl paper
36 x 36 in.
Kinkingna is the Tongva name for San Clemente Island, which gave San Clemente Avenue its name. Kinkignans had inhabited their island home for so long - 10,000 years - they had no stories of how they got here: they had simply been here forever.
By the time the Spaniards came north to California, other invaders were heading south. Siberian fur traders, having depleted sea otter colonies along the Alaskan Gulf, were literally moving in for the kill.
As the invaders killed off Kinkingna's sea otters, Kinkigna's peoples and culture were also ravished. A way of being in the world, nurtured across ten millennia, disappeared in a virtual broken heartbeat.
Legend says San Clemente was thrown into the ocean with an anchor 'round his neck, inspiring his patronage of mariners. The Kinkingnans were great seamen, but San Clemente offered them no protection when the invaders arrived.
Legend says Clemente's underwater tomb is made visible yearly to the faithful. But the Kinkingnans' culture reveals itself slowly, to researchers sifting through their island's mounds. Forget legend, forget romance: let us finally, belatedly appreciate the Kinkingnans as they really were.