Tongva And California State University Dominguez Hills They’re Still Here 1
In 1981 there was the largest American Indian Event in Southern California on the grounds of the Dominguez Hills Campus. It lasted four days with sporting events, contests, and two days of pow wow dancing and singing. The program included accolades from Mayor Bradley, President Donald Gerth talked about how the university loved working with the Native community and the richness of our diversity.
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After the celebration, Indian people were forgotten at Dominguez Hills. We had no record of this event having taken place. Silence is what allows a people to be forgotten.
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SOUTH BAY HISTORY The Suangna Native American village in Carson Posted on January 17, 2015 by Sam Gnerre https://laist.com/2019/10/14/los_angeles_second_annual_indi genous_peoples_day.php
In 1542, Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo encountered Suangna, one of several Gabrielino-Tongva villages that dotted the Harbor Area, Long Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and the largest village in the area now known as Carson. Preliminary archaeology by several researchers uncovered evidence of Suangna from present day Avalon Boulevard to Central Avenue.1 At that time, the Tongva were the largest, wealthiest, and most influential tribe in all of Southern California 2 The Rancho San Pedro, the first Spanish land grant in California was given in 1784 by King Carlos III to Juan Jose Dominguez, a retired Spanish soldier who came to California with the Portola expedition and later with Father Junipero Serra. The original land grant encompassed 75,000 acres, including the entire Los Angeles harbor, and the village of Suangna. 4
According to the article, Suangna was still occupied in 1850, but by 1900, it appeared to be deserted. We need to look at where they might have gone, and why. The Mission San Gabriel was part of the Spanish Mission System that dotted the coast from Baja to San Francisco. Each mission was expected to become a self-sufficient agricultural settlement as quickly as possible. Without colonists to cultivate crops and tend livestock, the priests conscripted California Indians to do the labor of farming, animal husbandry, building construction, and domestic work. In 1826, explorer Harrison Rogers wrote of the Mission San Gabriel Indians, “They are Kept in great fear, for the least offence, they are corrected, they are complete slaves in every sense of the word. 3 Many died of overwork, starvation, and disease, and were buried in mass graves, one of which is located at the present mission.
Gabrielino Indian Village of Sa-angna, Playa del Rey, California, Ballona Wetlands (Painting: Mary Leighton Thomson 5
According to the article, Suangna was still occupied in 1850, but by 1900, it appeared to be deserted. We need to look at where they might have gone, and why, The Mission San Gabriel was part of the Spanish Mission System that dotted the coast from Baja to San Francisco. Each mission was expected to become a self-sufficient agricultural settlement as quickly as possible. Without colonists to cultivate crops and tend livestock, the priests conscripted California Indians to do the labor of farming, animal husbandry, building construction, and domestic work. In 1826, explorer Harrison Rogers wrote of the Mission San Gabriel Indians, “They are Kept in great fear, for the least offence, they are corrected, they are complete slaves in every sense of the word. 3 Many died of overwork, starvation, and disease, and were buried in mass graves, one of which is located at the present mission.
Gabrielino Indian Village of Sa-angna, Playa del Rey, California, Ballona Wetlands (Painting: Mary Leighton Thomson 6
“A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct.” Governor Peter H . Burnett, 1851. After the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, the wholesale slaughter of Indians began with extermination of entire families and villages. In Shasta City, authorities paid five dollars for Indian heads. Miners now had a more lucrative trade turning in bags of Indian heads and scalps. The wholesale murder of Natives was not only condoned, but encouraged. And California's state treasury reimbursed many of the local governments for their expenses. Horace Bell relates that in Los Angeles, Indians were sold into slavery 52 weeks a year. In September 1850, the California Legislature passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, which made it legal to force Indians into slavery. An Indian convict-leasing clause allowed whites to arrest any Indian “found loitering and strolling about, or frequenting public places where liquors are sol, begging, or leading an immoral or profligate course of life.”3 Justin Farmer, California Indian Basket expert also sits on the Board of the Autrey Museum, related to our students in a presentation in 2018, that his grandmother was “acquired” by a non-Indian family deprived of learning to read and raised to be their domestic. Legal recourse was not an option. On April 1851, Indians were barred from testifying in court or to serve as jurors. General George Crook stated it was not infrequent for Indians to be shot in cold blood, or an Indian woman to be raped with no consequence to the perpetrator.3 7
The killing went on for years, though people doing the killing were more often wearing military uniforms as the decades passed. Native eyewitness accounts of attacks are rare; it was mainly whites doing the reporting. One exception comes from the 1850s, when white settlers along what’s now called the Lost Coast targeted a group of Sinkyone Indians for killing. Sally Bell, a Sinkyone girl who was ten years old at the time, survived by hiding in terror. She later reported: My grandfather and all of my family — my mother, my father, and we — were around the house and not hurting anyone. Soon, about ten o’clock in the morning, some white men came. They killed my grandmother and my mother and my father. I saw them do it… Then they killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the brush where I ran and hid. My little sister was a baby, just crawling around… I was so scared that I guess I just hid there a long time with my little sister’s heart in my hands.3 Sally Bell with husband Tom Bell near the site of the Needle Rock Massacre, 1923 | Photo courtesy Bancroft Librar https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/untold-history-thesurvival-of-californias-indians 8
The killings and kidnapping of children continued through the Civil War. One writer reported that in Ukiah “there were few families in town that did not have from one to three Indian children. And regionally, a writer estimated that kidnapped Indian children were in “every fourth white man’s house.” 3 The state of California also got involved. The government paid about $1.1 million in 1852 to militias to hunt down and kill Indians. In 1857 the California legislature allocated another $410,000 for the same purposes. In 1856 the state of California paid 25 cents for each Indian scalp. In 1860 the bounty was increased to $5. The mass killings stopped when there were few Indians to be found. Some scholars contend that California may have been home to a third of North America’s population before 1492.4 By1865, the Bureau of Indian Affairs estimated there were only 34,000 Indians left in California, but suffering was not over for Indians, in California and elsewhere in the United States. Reservations were established in the mid-19th century, and the conditions there were so brutal, Adolf Hitler is said to have used them in part as a blueprint for his Final Solution. On the Round Valley Reservation, Native Americans were getting only between 160 and 390 calories a day from federal officials, as part of what Madley calls "institutionalized starvation conditions." Eighty years later, the daily ration for prisoners at Auschwitz was 1,300 calories. 5 9
Discrimination persisted long afterward. Native Californian children were forced into Indian assimilation schools like Sherman Indian School in Riverside, California. Their hair was cut, regalia was burned, and they were punished for speaking their Native language. When they returned home, they could no longer speak their language and were considered outsiders. Although they fought for civil rights and federal recognition through the 21st century, Natives have the greatest disparities in poverty, health, economics, and education of any ethnicity in the United States. 4
Indian schools were to “kill the Indian, and save the man.� photo Library of Congress 10
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So the answer to our question, where did the Tongva go, is that many were killed, and the rest went into hiding. Many of those hiding in the Hispanic community kept their identities secret from their children, so many Tongva lost their heritage through time. Chief Red Blood Anthony Morales tells us that “as time went on, as society started changing, we needed to blend in with the other ethnic groups in Los Angeles because there was a bounty on us. We had to blend in with different cultures and become part of their societies. We were thought of as the lowest people, ethnically and race-wise”4 Jimi Castillo speaks of his childhood confusion regarding his identity, “We had Spanish last names, but we didn’t speak Spanish like our neighbors. When we ate, my mother would tell me not to take the food outside, or the neighbors would think we were Indian. When I finally confronted my father about our being Indian, he told me, we weren’t real Indians, just Mission Indians.” 12
Back to Carson, and Suangna: In 1971, Carson Councilman Gilbert D. Smith formed the Carson Indian Historical Advisory Committee which worked with CSUDH students and researchers to complete the application to have the site of Suagna designated as a point of historical interest by the California Historical Landmarks Advisory Committee. In 1972, California made the Suangna site the first ative American site of historical interest to be recognized in Los Angeles County. 1
Plaque installed in front of the Watson Industrial Complex
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A ceremony to commemorate the occasion was held on Oct. 20, 1972, co-sponsored by Carson and Watson Industrial Properties, the current owner of the land. The ceremony included speeches by CSUDH students Weecie Ford and Michael Myers. Myers gave the keynote address. In addition to Councilman Gil Smith and his fellow Carson Council members, Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, and Watson president Bill Huston, the event also included an appearance by movie and TV actor Iron Eyes Cody. (Cody’s native American portrayals became iconic even though it was revealed in 1996 that his real name was Espera Oscar de Corti from Italy.)1
It would appear that neither the university or citizens of Carson realized the Tongva were still here. 14
Although a California Senate Bill of 2008 asserts that the US government signed treaties with the Tongva among other California tribal nations, promising 8.5 million acres (3,400,000 ha) of land for reservations and that these particular treaties were never ratified8 So, in short, the Tongva were swindled out of any land, and today they remain landless,E and although they have achieved State Recognition, the U.S. Government refuses to recognize them, so they remain landless and without the sovereignty of other tribal nations. On June 18, 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-15 establishing a Truth and Healing Council during his apology to Native Americans for the atrocities that were inflicted.7 So, in answer to our question: “What happened to the Tongva?� Although many were killed or driven into hiding. Many others that hid in the Hispanic community lost even the rememberance of who they are. Only a few thousand remain who have managed to keep their culture and ceremonies. Everything happened to them, but they are still right here.
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Jimi Castillo blesses our Peace Pole honoring the nations of the world. CSUDH News April 27, 2016
West Basin Unveils Ocean Friendly Garden at CSUDH Sentinel News Service April 9, 2015 16
References 1.
Gnerre, Sam. South Bay History, 17 Jan. 2015, blogs.dailybreeze.com/history/2015/01/17/the-suangna-native-american-village-incarson/.
2.
Kroeber, Alfred Louis. Handbook of the Indians of California. Dover, 1976.
3.
Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: the United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. Yale University Press, 2017.
4.
Clarke, Chris. Untold History: The Survival of California's Indians. 27 June 2019, www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/untoldhistory-the-survival-of-californias-indians.
5.
Nazaryan, Alexander. California Slaughter: The State-Sanctioned Genocide of Native Americans. www.newsweek.com/2016/08/26/california-native-americans-genocide-490824.html
6.
Lloyd in Arts & Entertainment on October 9, Annie. A Brief History Of L.A.'s Indigenous Tongva People. 9 Oct. 2017, laist.com/2017/10/09/a_brief_history_of_the_tongva_people.php.
7.
Blakemore, Erin. “California Slaughtered 16,000 Native Americans. The State Finally Apologized For the Genocide.� History.com, A&E Television Networks, 19 June 2019, history.com/news/native-american-genocide-california-apology.
8.
Oropeza, J.; Scott, J.; Yee, L.; Davis, M.; Karnette, B. (January 31, 2008). "Senate Bill No. 1134". California Legislative Information. Legislative Counsel of California. Archived from the original on October 20, 2013.
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