WA WA CHAW

- BONITA ‘WA WA CALACHAW’ NUNEZ (WA WA CHAW) -

Rincon Band Luiseño, 1888-1972

Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nuñez (known professionally as Wa Wa Chaw or Wa-Wa-Chaw) was born December 25, 1888, on the Rincon division of the Luiseño (Luiseno) people in Southern California and died in 1972. As an infant she was adopted by Mary Duggan and Dr. Cornelius Duggan of New York, who raised her in Manhattan; that urban upbringing placed her at the intersection of Euro-American intellectual circles and her Luiseño roots, shaping both her public advocacy and creative work. Wa Wa Chaw is remembered not only as a painter but as a lecturer, writer and activist who spoke and wrote widely on Native and women’s issues during the first half of the 20th century. 

Artistically, Wa Wa Chaw produced a distinct body of paintings and diaries that blend figurative portraiture, ceremonial and domestic scenes, and strongly personal text fragments and poems. Her paintings often present tightly composed, flattened figures with expressive faces and symbolic elements—works that convey critique, memory, and cultural pride rather than a romanticized “ethnographic” view. 

Wa Wa Chaw’s works entered museum and institutional collections during her lifetime and through later donations and acquisitions. Notably, the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution) holds multiple paintings donated from her estate or collections, and several regional museums list her in their catalogs (for example the Philbrook Museum of Art includes a biographical entry and holdings). Her work has appeared in gallery and auction records (including listings at Christie’s) and in exhibitions organized around Native American women artists and early 20th-century Indigenous modernisms; a group of her paintings was explicitly noted as donated to the National Museum of the American Indian and remains accessible through that collection’s online catalogue.