From the unceded lands of Tovaangar (aka Los Angeles or el Pueblo de Los Ángeles, lit. the "City of Angels," once the Spain-dominated Mexican El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula or "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the River Porciúncula"), we welcome those who respect and nurture this land.
Of course, we can only speak for this First Nation territory, which has the largest concentration of Indigenous peoples in the nation, the others having been largely displaced or forcibly removed from their traditional lands, which they peacefully stewarded for millennia. The original indigenous tribe that nurtured this land for 10,000 years or more are (not were) the Kizh, Tongva, or Gabrieleno American Indians.
The first name is of the customary housing structure, the next is an exonym suggested by a UCLA researcher, and the third was imposed by the invading imperial Spanish forces overtaking Mexico, of which Los Angeles was a part for centuries. It comes from the San Gabriel Mission in the LA suburb of the San Gabriel Valley under the San Gabriel Mountains of the Angeles National Forest.
(Studio Seven Media, LLC) Aug. 14, 2026: Andrew Guiding Young Cloud Morales · Gabrieleno Tongva Ensemble · Connor Chee Tongva Songs We Are Here Ekwa Chem ℗ 2026 Studio Seven Media, LLC Released on: 2026-08-14. Flute: Andrew Guiding Young Cloud Morales Ensemble: Gabrieleno Tongva Ensemble Piano: Connor Chee Producer: Edward Dale Chung Producer: Nicole Zuratis Producer: Kitt Wakeley Producer: Greg Scelsa Unknown: Campbell Young Mixing Engineer: Tony Correlli Mastering Engineer: Kevin Lively Music Publisher: Copyright Control Composer Lyricist: Andrew Guiding Young Cloud Morales.
It's a good idea to pick and choose one's religion. In doing so, a common mistake is to throw out previous customs. When the Indigenous people were "Christianized" by the imperial holy Roman Catholic Church in its Vatican stronghold (formerly devoted completely to Mithra worship before converting to Jesus and Mary adoration), it was inconceivable to leave behind millennia of traditions and practices in tune with nature.
A JuBu friend invited us to a Quaker Friends Meeting for a Sunday morning "meditation." There was silence, which the Society of Friends called worship. We loved it. Returning from summer vacation two weeks ago, we dropped in an hour early and were pleasantly surprised to find Tongva representative Mona Morales Recalde making a presentation with her father Chief Anthony Morales in the audience.
It struck us as odd that here we were in a peace-loving Christian congregation, and she's a happy Presbyterian being helped in her work by her church. Progress is being made because part of the SG Mission, once home to the Native American Joan of ArcToypurina, has been returned, repatriated, restored to Tongva hands.
Having been born into Catholicism and not liking the patriarchy at all (even though there are many beautiful aspects to the peoples' Catholicism worth preserving, not the least of which being the honoring of beloved Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and a pre-Church version of Gnostic Jesus, cloistered monkhood, maybe even the Holy Ghost, but the genocidal Father and hypocritical priesthood not so much), it was easy to make the decision to leave it behind.
The Church doesn't let someone get away that easy, so it was easier to leave for agnosticism, atheism, anti-Catholicism. It came to make the most sense to regard all "religion" as Christianity, and all of it was bad and worth rejecting. Some teachings may well be good, of course; the rejection is of the imperial, genocidal, hypocritical, homosexual child molesting institution. Christians are held through fear and childhood indoctrination. If a person is unable to awaken and reject it, that will be that person's downfall.
Imagine the good fortune of finding Eastern philosophy and the diamond in the coal that is Buddhism in particular! Of course, Buddhism in Asia has become an ossified tradition as well, but less so than Western traditions. In any case, Buddhism is relatively new to us in the West so we get to pick and choose what to embrace, what to reject, and what to attempt to change.
Our parents might not always be happy with our decisions, but we sure are. And when one learns the deeper meaning of the Dharma, suddenly one sees Christianity, at least in its original pre-institutional form, has much good.
Now Tongva Natives, Buddhists, Presbyterians, [anti-genocidal] Jews, and Quakers can all hold hands in LA and think, "Hey, at least we can all get along in a place called Pasadena."
In the pre-colonial era, the Indigenous people lived in as many as 100 villages and primarily identified by their village rather than by a pan-tribal name [3].
During colonization, the imperial Spanish invaders referred to these people as Gabrieleño and Fernandeño [a], names derived from the Spanish "missions" (concentration and forced labor camps for Catholic conversion, ethnic cleansing, and reeducation) built on Native land, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel ("Archangel") and Mission San Fernando Rey de España ("King of Spain") [b].
Poor upkeep on modern demonstration models
Tongva (a word that simply means "the land") is the most widely circulated endonym among the people, used by Narcisa Higuera in 1905 to refer to inhabitants in the vicinity of Mission San Gabriel [4]. Some people who identify as direct lineal descendants [5] of the people advocate the use of their ancestral name Kizh as an endonym [6].
The Tongva, along with neighboring groups such as the Chumash (the "beautiful people") of Malibu and Ventura, played an important role in the region's cultural and economic dynamics at the time of the European invasion and displacement "encounter."
The Tongva had developed an extensive trade network through their form of canoes or te'aats (plank-built rowing boats).
Their diverse food and material culture was based on an Indigenous worldview that positioned humans as one strand in a web of life (as expressed in their creation stories) [7, 1, 2, 8].
Over time, different communities came to speak distinct dialects of the Tongva language, part of the Takic subgroup of the Uto-Aztecan language family prevalent throughout Indigenous Mexico, of which Los Angeles was a part.
There may have been five or more such languages (three on the southernmost Channel Islands and at least two on the mainland) [1].
European contact was first made in 1542 by Spanish explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, who was greeted at Santa Catalina by people in a canoe. The following day, Cabrillo and his men entered a large bay on the mainland, which they named Baya de los Fumos ("Bay of Smokes," referring to smog or vapors, a natural consequence of the natural basin) because of the many smoke fires they saw there.
Indigenous peoples smoked fish to preserve it. This is commonly believed to have been San Pedro Bay, near present-day San Pedro [9].
The Gaspar de Portolá land expedition in 1769 resulted in the founding of Mission San Gabriel by Catholic missionary rapist abuser and Priest Junipero Serra in 1771 to begin the ethnic cleansing of the area. Under the mission concentration camp system, the Spanish initiated an era of forced relocation and enslavement. More
Revolutions to resist invaders, imperial occupiers, Catholic rapists
Spanish Catholics celebrating their beautiful traditions in the name of their genocidal God.
Nearly 6,000 Tongva lie dead and buried in the grounds of the San Gabriel Mission today [51]. Carey McWilliams characterized it as follows: "the Franciscan padres ["patriarchs, fathers, Catholic priests"] eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps [an idea Hitler and the Nazis got from the USA]...." [52]
There is much evidence of Tongva resistance to the imperial mission system [3, 12] that aimed to enslave and ethnically cleanse them from the land during the ongoing slow genocide.
Many Native individuals returned to their village at the time of death. Many forcibly converted Catholics retained their traditional Indigenous practices in both spiritual and domestic contexts, despite the attempts by the padres and Christian missionaries to suppress, brainwash (erase), and control them.
Traditional foods were incorporated into the white man's impoverished mission diet. Lithic and shell bead production and use persisted. More overt strategies of resistance, such as refusal to enter the system, work slowdowns, abortion and infanticide of children resulting from rape by priests, and uprisings were also prevalent.
Five major uprisings were recorded just at Mission San Gabriel [3], the first of many such concentration camps sexually exploiting the Natives and enslaving them, stripping them of their identity, cultural practices, language, and identity.
Two late-18th-century rebellions against the mission's forced labor system were led by Nicolás José [the Spanish name placed on him by Catholic priests], who was an early Catholic convert who had two social identities, "publicly participating in Catholic sacraments at the mission but privately committed to traditional [Tongva] dances, celebrations, and rituals" [3].
Toypurina: I didn't want us to be raped/erased.
He loved the system so much he participated in a failed attempt to kill the mission's priests in 1779 and organized eight foothill villages in a revolt in October 1785 along with Tongva ShamanToypurina.
She further organized the villages to resist occupation and abuses [53], which "demonstrated a previously undocumented level of regional political unification both within and well beyond the mission" [3]. The mission strategy had always been to divide and conquer.
However, divided loyalties among the Natives contributed to the failure of the 1785 attempt, as well as mission soldiers being alerted of the attempt by Catholic converts or neophytes [3].
George W. Kirkman's 1938 historical map of pre-1860 Los Angeles County shows locations of "Gabrieleño” villages marked with generic "Indian teepees.” (The locals never lived in teepees but rather in wigwam-like structures called kizh).
Kangaroo court trial for Native rebels
Toypurina, José, and two other leaders of the rebellion, Chief Tomasajaquichi of Juvit Village and a Tongva man named Alijivit, from the nearby village of Jajamovit, were put on trial for the 1785 rebellion [53].
At his trial, José stated that he participated because the ban at the mission on Tongva dances and ceremonies instituted by the missionaries, and enforced by the governor of California in 1782, was intolerable as they prevented their mourning ceremonies [3].
When questioned about the attack, Toypurina is famously quoted as saying that she participated in the instigation because “[she hated] the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains.…
We lived in peace for thousands of years.
“I came [to the Catholic mission] to inspire the dirty cowards to fight, and not to quail at the sight of Spanish sticks that spit fire and death, nor [to] retch at the evil smell of gunsmoke -- and be done with you white invaders!” [53]
Scholars have debated the accuracy of this quote, from Thomas Workman Temple II's article “Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel,” suggesting it may differ significantly from the testimony recorded by Spanish authorities at the time.
According to the soldier who recorded her words, she stated simply that she ‘‘was angry with the Padres and the others of the Mission, because they had come to live and establish themselves in her land” [53].
In June 1788, nearly three years later, their sentences arrived from Mexico City:
Nicolás José was banned from San Gabriel and sentenced to six years of hard labor in irons at the most distant penitentiary in the region [53].
Toypurina was banished from Mission San Gabriel and sent to the most distant Spanish mission [to be raped and married off to a Spaniard].
[The others all met with similar fates, none exempted, acquitted, or found innocent.]
This violent resistance to occupation, displacement, rape, ethnic cleansing, and Spanish rule demonstrated how the Spanish Crown's claims to California were both insecure and violently contested [12].
By the 1800s, San Gabriel [forced labor camp] was the richest in the entire colonial mission system, supplying invasive species of cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, horses, mules, and other supplies for settlers and settlements throughout Alta ["Upper"] California.
Some historians have dared to accurately portray the mission system as a form of coerced labor that deeply disrupted Indigenous lifeways and autonomy.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
Latter-day ethnologist Hugo Reid reported, “Indian children were taken from their parents to be raised behind bars at the mission. They were allowed outside the locked dormitories only to attend to church business and their assigned chores.
“When they were old enough, boys and girls were put to work in the vast vineyards [to make alcohol] and orchards owned by the missions. “Soldiers watched, ready to hunt down any who tried to escape.”
Writing in 1852, Reid said he knew of Tongva who “had an ear lopped off or were branded on the lip for trying to get away” [54].
In 1810, the “Gabrieleño” forced labor population at the mission was recorded to be 1,201 [slaves]. It jumped to 1,636 in 1820 and then declined to 1,320 in 1830 [51].
Resistance to this system of forced labor continued into the early 19th century. In 1817, the San Gabriel Mission recorded that there were "473 Indian [slave] fugitives" [10].
In 1828, a European German immigrant purchased the land on which the village of Yang-Na stood and evicted the entire community with the help of Mexican officials [55]. More
Last near, a large part of Los Angeles County burned in the "LA Fires" -- Eaton Fire in the foothills of Altadena above affluent Pasadena and the Palisades Fire in the affluent coastal area of Pacific Palisades near Malibu -- but did anyone like the mayor learn anything? Not so far as anyone can tell. No official has read The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin?
OJ: Blame it on him. I'm the Juice
Granted it's about igniting social unrest (like the LA Uprising of 1992 triggered by racist LAPD cop and disgraced perjurer Mark Fuhrman, who died last week) rather than wildfires burning out of control, but whatever we've been through as a county, there's worse to come. There's the Big One, an earthquake to flatten the place, a tsunami to inundate the low lying areas of the basin, and there's a cosmic radiation solar emission to take out all the electronics and powerlines.
Fraud Fuhrman hired by FOX
What did the Buddha say about being in this sort of position? He once asked a king what he would do if messengers were to tell him that an adversary were approaching from the east, west, north, and south. The king replied, "What could I do but rely on the Dhamma?" The Buddha then said that there were four such enemies approaching so that whatever he was going to do, it would be wise to do it NOW. The thing is, the Buddha wasn't only talking to that king. Those same adversaries are approaching each of us. But do we notice, listen, pay attention, or act accordingly?
In 1995, Det. Fuhrman was called to testify regarding his alleged "discovery" of evidence in the OJ Simpson case, including a bloody glove recovered at OJ's Brentwood estate. During the trial, witnesses claimed that in the 1980s, LAPD cop Fuhrman frequently described African Americans as "niggers," claims he denied. In response, Simpson's defense team produced recorded interviews with Fuhrman, and witnesses proved that he had repeatedly used racist language during those interviews [1]. As a result, the defense claimed Fuhrman had committed perjury and was not a credible witness. The credibility of the prosecution has been cited as one reason big Simpson was acquitted [2]. The defense claimed Fuhrman planted key evidence as part of a racially motivated plot against Simpson. When asked under oath (without the jury being present), Fuhrman declined to answer all questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right. These questions included whether he planted or manufactured evidence. He didn't want to answer? Fuhrman "retired" from the LAPD in 1995. In 1996, he pleaded guilty by pleading "no contest" to perjury for his false testimony related to his use of racial epithets. Fuhrman claimed he was not a racist and apologized for his use of racist language [3]. He did not apologize for potentially starting the deadly "LA Riots" or the people killed, an uprising that was a long time in the making due to flagrant LAPD racism. More
The Buddha was dwelling in Savatthi. Then King Pasenadi of Kosala approached the Blessed One in the middle of the day, bowed, and sat respectfully to one side. Sitting there, the Blessed One said to him, "Great king, where are you coming from in the middle of the day?"
"Venerable sir, just now I was engaged in the affairs of an anointed noble-warrior king, enjoying the intoxication of royal sovereignty, obsessed with lust for sensual pleasures, who has attained stable control of his kingdom after having conquered a great sphere of earthly territory."
"Great king, what do you think? Suppose a trustworthy and reliable man were to come to you from the east and say, 'If it please your majesty, know that I come from the east where I saw a great mountain, as high as the clouds, coming this way, crushing all the living beings [in its path]. Do as you see fit.'
"'Then suppose a second man were to come from the west... Then a third man were to come from the north... Then a fourth man were to come from the south and say, 'If it please your majesty, know that I come from the south where I saw a great mountain, as high as the clouds, coming this way, crushing all living beings. Do as you see fit.'
"Great king, if such great peril should arise, such a terrible waste of human life — a human rebirth being so hard to obtain — what should be done?"
"Venerable sir, if such great peril should arise, such a terrible waste of human life — a human rebirth being so hard to obtain — what else should be done but conduct in accordance with the Dhamma, right action, skillful deeds, meritorious karma?"
"Then, great king, I inform you, I announce to you, aging and death are rolling in upon you. Great king, when aging and death are rolling in upon you, what should be done?"
"Venerable sir, as aging and death are rolling in upon me, what else should be done but conduct in accordance with the Dhamma, right conduct, skillful deeds, meritorious karma?
"Venerable sir, there are elephant battles [fought by] anointed noble-warrior kings enjoying the intoxication of royal sovereignty, obsessed by lust for sensual pleasures, who have attained stable control of their kingdom and who rule having conquered a great sphere of earthly territory. But there is no use in elephant battles, no sense in them, when aging and death are rolling in.
"There are cavalry battles... chariot battles... infantry battles... But there is no use for such battles, no sense in them, when aging and death are rolling in.
"In this royal court there are counselors who, when the enemies arrive, are capable of dividing them by their wit. But there is no use for such battles of wits, no sense in them, when aging and death are rolling in.
"In this royal court there is abundant gold and silver stored in vaults and depositories, and with such wealth we are capable of buying off enemies when they come. But there is no use in battles of wealth, no sense in them, when aging and death are rolling in. As aging and death are rolling in upon me, venerable sir, what else should be done but conduct in accordance with Dhamma, right conduct, skillful deeds, meritorious karma?"
"So it is, great king, so it is! As aging and death are rolling in upon you, what else should be done but conduct in accordance with Dhamma, right conduct, skillful deeds, meritorious karma?"
That is what the Blessed One said. Having said it, the One Well-Gone [the Welcome One], the Teacher, went on to summarize:
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