Barbareno (2025)

"Barbareno" is based on a true untold story of the West Coast multiracial abolitionist Native American anti-slavery movement (via my 10 year indigenous rights development tribal authorized/oversight process w/ multiple tribal elder families as producers/co-stars). Chronicles pan-pacific migration of the 13,000 year history of America's oldest tribe/California's most powerful tribal empire). Depicts the Santa Barbara Chumash Native American 8,000 year old bloodline frontier and modern day descendants in their 450 year resistance movement of the 19th century California frontier era, who fought for their survival against all odds (despite 95% of their population annihilated). Anti-slavery abolitionist heroes Nicholas Den and wife Rosa risked their own lives while being attacked for helping to save many native lives by creating an "underground railroad" on their coastal Dos Pueblos Ranch. Nicholas, Irish immigrant, was a rancher and the first medical doctor in Santa Barbara and his wife Rosa was a Mexican national who both fought to protect the Chumash "Princess of Gaviota Coast" native heroine Maria De Los Angeles from attacks for her interracial marriage to Rosa's brother Vincent. With the Chumash Indian Tribe almost wiped out due to multiple epidemics and CA institutionalized slavery, they learned the Barbareno dialect native language and homeopath medicines to help save lives. Additionally, during the Mexican American War, he treated prisoners of war on both sides, and was given the title "Comandante" of the Santa Barbara Presidio by U.S. Navy Commodore Robert Field Stockton when Santa Barbara was under martial law. Nicholas Den was a pacifist, however, and when cattle thieves threatened his 25,000 acre ranch, his Dos Pueblos Chumash vaquero (cowboys) took up arms to defend Den, in addition to attending his wedding, and mourning at his passing in 1862 with a tribal ceremony. As Nicholas Den's dying act, despite him having a life threatening case pneumonia, he selflessly rode on horseback miles in the rain to save the life of a pregnant Chumash Indian woman who was undergoing complications; Den died later that night of his pneumonia. He was one of the most wealthy and powerful men in the state, and was a California "founding father." BARBARENO was originally *co-commissioned/authorized in Oct. 2013 at an official Irish heritage ceremony at Dos Pueblos Ranch (which I was invited to/attended) by the *A.I.H.S. (American Irish Historical Society) founded by President Theadore Roosevelt.