“ The sun is the beauty of the world- it is born in the east giving the world beautiful light... The morning and the evening stars were the wives of the sun… The sun goes to rest in this hole (of a sand dollar) and leaves it’s rays outside while it rests inside. Dawn is the sigh of the sun. The real name of the sun was kaqunup?mawa. This is it’s metaphorical name, and really meant ‘ the radiance of the child born on the twenty-fourth of December’.” (Harrington/Blackburn, 1975, p. 96)                   

Kaqunup?mawa: The Sun
from The Harrington Papers Series
18”x18”
Mixed Media Collage on Art Board
2006
$500.

The Harrington Papers Series
These works incorporate printed text from some of the Chumash Oral Narratives that were collected by John Peabody Harrington. The text functions as a puzzle of sorts. It appears to be piled in random layers and only part of the story is revealed.

A note on the text: the ? is a phonetic rendition of a glottal stop sound that is not found in the English language. For more information visit Inezeno Chumash Language Tutorial