Los Angeles Natives: 'We're still here'

The sleepy Tongva land of Tovaangar under a full moon in the modern day (Los Angeles).

(Santa Monica History Museum) Tongva (Kizh, Gabrielenos): E'kwa'shem, "We're still here"

Say it in the Tongva language

(LA Dept. of Arts and Culture) Mercedes Dorame, Gabrielino Tongva of CA

• Native Los Angelenos: The Kizh (Tongva) Nation

The Los Angeles Natives or Tongva

What Los Angeles needs is an imported system of racism like Spain instituted in Baja California

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We lived happily in our kizh for millennia.

The Tongva (Kizh, Gabrielenos) are an Indigenous people of California from the Los Angeles Basin, foothills, and the Southern Channel Islands, including Catalina, an area covering approximately 4,000 square miles (10,000 km2) [1, 2].

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].

Tongva homes or kizh were sturdy and durable reed-thatched huts or wigwams

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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).

The genocide the USA put Indians through

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.

Blood soaked Catholic rapist Junipero Serra

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.

Native Myths Made in America

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]

• What happened to the Yaqui? (The Yaqui)

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.

Te'aat/tomol crossing Channel Islands, 2012

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 Shaman Toypurina.

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].

Do LA Natives suffer PTSS?

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

• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 3) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
• "All the Real Indians Died Off": And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans (Myths Made in America) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker
• Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing by Dr. Joy DeGruy
• Santa Monica History Museum; Los Angeles Department of Arts and Culture; Xochitl, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Sheldon S., Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation) (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit