1 History Department Acknowledgement of the Tongva

History Department Acknowledgement of the Tongva and Greater Indigenous Lands occupied by the University of Southern California The History Department of USC acknowledges our presence on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Tongva people and their neighbors: (from North to South) the Chumash, Tataviam, Kitanemuk, Serrano, Cahuilla, Payomkawichum, Acjachemen, Ipai-Tipai, Kumeyaay, and Quechan peoples, whose ancestors ruled the region we now call Southern California for at least 9,000 years. Indigenous stewardship and rightful claims to these lands have never been voluntarily relinquished nor legally extinguished. We pay respects to the members and elders of these communities, past and present, who remain stewards, caretakers, and advocates of these lands, river systems, and the waters and islands of the Santa Barbara Channel. As a department of professional historians, we undertake an obligation to present truthful facts about USC’s specific occupation of Tongva lands. (We hope that other units of this university will also make an acknowledgement such as this, but we do not presume to speak for more than our own department in this document). Tongva lands and islands were traditionally ruled by autonomous village-states, knitted together by kinship, language, culture, and institutions. The University Park Campus and the Health Sciences Campuses of USC occupy unceded territory belonging to the villages of Yaangna (Downtown Los Angeles and East LA); Geveronga (Pico-Union); Sa’aangna (Baldwin Hills); Huutnga (Compton); and Ochuungna (South Pasadena). People of these village-states were deeply interconnected by kinship ties and trading relations. They spoke the same language and maintained a regional community that stretched from the San Gabriel Valley to the Southern Channel Islands, and from the Hollywood Hills to the San Pedro Bight (the LA Harbor). Prior to the Spanish conquest that began in 1769, the people of these villages intensively managed their lands, by cultivating, pruning, seeding, and above all, by seasonal burning. The areas surrounding USC’s two main campuses were, until about 1800, principally oak and riparian woodlands, oak savannas, and prairie flowerfields. Intensive landscape management by the Tongva villages yielded an abundance of acorns (their principal staple), and the seeds of annual herbs, such as chia, and the birds, animals and fish, whose numbers were also magnified by the sustainable landscape management of the Tongva and their neighbors. Catastrophic disruption of this ancient political economy by the invading Spanish Empire, plus mass violence, forced confinement and forced labor under occupying Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. regimes diminished the Indigenous populations in appalling numbers. But the Indigenous peoples of Southern California survived through three conquering regimes and still thrive today in an unbroken chain linking past to present. The following paragraphs provide context and details of this history for just one place--the University Park Campus of the University of Southern California--so that recognition of Indigenous rights to the land, sky, and waters of this region shall have a factual basis worthy of an institution dedicated to truth, knowledge, and the pursuit of human rights. The University Park Campus of the University of Southern California sits closest to the former villages of Yaangna, Geveronga, Sa’aangna, and was most probably controlled by them for thousands of years. In traditional Tongva societies, all consumable resources--every oak tree, every patch of flowerfield, every wetland and firewood gathering area--was either the collective 1 property of the village as a whole, or the hereditary property of a particular family. The University Park Campus was for countless generations, a treeless flowerfield burned and harvested by either the Yaangvit (People of Yaangna), the Geverovit (People of Geveronga), or the Sa’aavit (People of Sa’aangna), or all three. Yaangna was a primary, or “capital” village among the Tongva, one of the most important central places of the entire region (which is why the Spanish chose it for the site of Los Angeles). Yaangna controlled access to, and the crossing of the LA River at its only year-round flowing segment. Geveronga was a secondary (smaller, less powerful) village, lying just to its south-west, as was Sa’aangna, nestled against the Baldwin Hills to the west. The precise boundaries between the gathering areas of these three village-states are lost to us now, and it is possible that these and other villages shared overlapping gathering rights to the future University Park Campus area. Traditional, pre-European geographies were highly complex: commonly segmented, non-contiguous, and overlapping, depending on the context (resources, jurisdictions, kinship alliances, enmities, religious societies, guilds, trading relationships etc.). Tongva villages specialized in different commodities, depending upon their location. The Tongva villages closest to the site of the USC University Campus area focused on terrestrial resources, while those along the Pacific Coast and the southern Channel Islands specialized in marine resources. They all traded with one another, and with the Chumash, Tataviam, and many other neighbors, in a vast and complex regional civilization, tied together by ocean-going vessels called Ti’at by the Tongva and Tomol by the Chumash (see “Rethinking the Coast with the Ti’at society”). https://www.linktv.org/shows/tending-nature/episodes/rethinking-the-coast-with-the-tiat-society 2 Capital Villages of the Chumash, Tongva, and Payomkawichim, showing Principal Trade Routes, circa 1770. Cartography by P. Ethington (2019) The Los Angeles River, known to the Tongva as ”Paayme Paxaayt” (West River), and to the Spanish as “Rio Porciúncula” drains a vast watershed that encompasses the entire San Fernando Valley and much of the San Gabriel Mountains. On the floors of the San Fernando Valley and the South Los Angeles flood plain, the river sinks into the deep alluvial gravels during the summer. The Tongva villages of Yaangna and Geveronga sat advantageously near the only place where the LA River flows above ground throughout the entire year, forced upward by bedrock through the gap between the Hollywood Hills and the San Gabriel Foothills called the “Glendale Narrows.” In this region’s climate, of cool wet winters and hot dry summers, the Los Angeles River often floods violently as it exits the Glendale Narrows, and has shifted its course-- both above and below the Glendale Narrows, countless times. As recently as the years 1815- 1825, it shifted suddenly westward, directly across the future USC/UPC campus site. Indigenous peoples of the Los Angeles Basin depended upon the waters of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel River watersheds, but they knew, from thousands of years of experience, never to build on such a site. Instead, when it was not under the course of Paayme Paxaayt (the LA River), they would have burned the open land seasonally to maximize the yield of flowering annuals, driving rabbits into traps as they did so. The Yaavit, Geverovit, and Sa’aavit lost control of this seasonal flowerfield where the University Park Campus sits today, during the period of conquest and colonization by the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. regimes (1769-present). The Spanish established a colonial military, religious, and economic base at Misíon San Gabriel Arcángel in the 1770s, relocating 3 thousands of Tongva and their neighbors from scores of surrounding village-states. The two principal Spanish Missions in the Los Angeles Basin, Misión San Gabriel Arcángel (founded 1771) and San Fernando Rey de España (founded 1787), were colonial haciendas, supplying the economic backbone of the entire Spanish occupation of the province they called “Alta California.” Their gigantic herds of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs (numbering in the tens of thousands), many acres of grape vines and fruit trees, along with craft workshops, all depended on the forced labor of the oppressed Tongva and their neighbors. The Spanish eradicated the Indigenous economic base by displacing the flowerfields with European grazing grasses and cutting the ancient acorn-bearing oaks (typically 300-500 years old) for lumber. People of the many Tongva villages were forced into the deadly missions at different rates, with many peripheral villages remaining independent and supplying refuge to the Indigenous who escaped the missions. The Indigenous peoples of Southern California contested and resisted the conquering regimes from the very outset. Kumeyaay, Ipai-Tipai, and Quechan peoples rose against Misíon San Diego in 1775, and a major uprising in 1785 against Misíon San Gabriel, led by the Tongva rebel Toypurina, was only barely suppressed. The Quechan closed the Colorado River crossing to Europeans for 50 years beginning in 1781, forcing the Spanish and Mexicans to enter Southern California either by sea or via the Santa Fe Trail at Cajon Pass (near present-day San Bernardino), far to the north and across the Mojave desert. Large confederations of Chumash and their Yokut and Tataviam neighbors rebelled against Misíon Santa Inés, Misíon Santa Barbara, and Misíon La Purisima, in 1824. Between these dates thousands of people committed everyday acts of resistance and escaped, or attempted escape, from the deadly forced-labor missions to free villages in the surrounding mountains (Yokut and Serrano) and deserts (Cahuilla, Mojave, Apache, Quechan). Ongoing efforts to obtain federal tribal

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