TONGVA VS. KIZH

The Battle to Name L.A.'s Indigenous People

Southern California Mission Indians preparing for planting, with their mission to the far right (drawing by A. B. Dodge, early 1900s)

In 1921 the Los Angeles Times headlined the death of the purported last member of the area’s Gabrieleño Indians, José de los Santos Juncos, lamenting that “with him died the last vestige of personal remembrance of the golden age of the California Missions and the passing of a vanished race.”[1] What the article glossed over was that the Spanish colonialists, besides uprooting the native peoples who’d thrived in the region for 1000s of years, imprisoning them in the missions, and force-feeding them Christianity, had renamed them according to the mission to which most of them were consigned, Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.

Oh, and by the way, not only was the claim that the Gabrieleño “race” had “vanished” utterly bogus, but the extinction myth would persist for more than half-a-century.

A modern-day Gabrieleño, Bea Alva, recalled that the leader of a Labor Day parade in the 1950s had echoed the “vanished race” claim, and another tribal member, Denise Martinez, remembered being scolded by her 4^th-grade teacher in the 1980s when Denise said she was Native American: “You live in a house, you wear clothes, so you can’t be an Indian!”[2]

By the 1990s, the Gabrieleños themselves began doing the teaching, declaring reports of their extinction greatly exaggerated and engaging in political activism that led to the recognition, preservation, and reconsecration of sacred Indian sites in Long Beach, Playa Vista, West Los Angeles, Seal Beach, and Newport Beach.

Tongva Sacred Springs, University High School, Los Angeles, 2023 (photo Jengod)

Equally significantly, if more controversially, the Gabrieleños began redressing their mission-era name. And push came to shove right off the bat, when some members of the Gabrielino Band of Mission Indians—Gabrielino being an anglicized spelling of Gabrieleño from LA’s early American period—left the group out of protest over the decision of its leaders, Cindi Alvitri and Anthony Morales, to rename the group the Gabrielino/Tongva Band of San Gabriel.

The disaffected members objected to the name Tongva, which they argued had no legitimate historical basis; whereas the name Kizh (pronounced “Keesh”), with which they identified, was in fact mentioned in the mission records as an alternative name for Gabrieleño. Kizh wasn’t perfect either, as it also had been given to the local Indians by the Spaniards. What it had going for it was that it was at least an actual tribal word, for the native people’s thatched-hut homes.[3]

Recreated kizh, 2023 (photo Jengod)

Whichever name the tribe chose, the desire to establish a more authentic identity was a step forward. But the Kizh/Tongva dispute also signaled the beginning of an ever-widening intra-tribal schism, continuing to the present, which has undermined the people’s overarching desire to finally gain federal recognition.

State recognition (with a major caveat, as we’ll see) would be granted in 1994. But federal recognition, besides boosting individual and collective self-esteem and providing increased welfare benefits for a demographic at the bottom of the economic ladder, also paved the way for a Los Angeles-area casino and the prospect of a billion-dollar bonanza such as the Pechanga band of Luiseño Indians to the southeast and Chumash Indians to the northwest have enjoyed.

Pechanga Resort and Casino, Temecula, California, 2021 (photo Camarocruzin)

After their rift with the Kizh group, the Gabrielino/Tongva group splintered again in 2003, this time over bloodlines and whether to have a casino, which a portion of the Gabrielino/Tongva Band (aka “slash” group) opposed and a newly formed Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe (aka “hyphen” group) supported. Then in 2007, the hyphen group also fractured, over accusations of fiscal improprieties, from which the Gabrielino/Tongva Nation emerged.

The renamed Kizh Nation (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians) initially steered clear of the Tongva groups’ infighting, instead marshalling further evidence supporting the Kizh claim to legitimacy and debunking the Tongva claim. Kizh Nation spokesperson Tim Poyorena-Miguel began holding lectures at historical societies and libraries in 2008, but by this time Tongva had become entrenched as the authentic tribal name in official circles and the public consciousness.

Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley’s otherwise groundbreaking O My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (2009), makes no mention of a Kizh-named alternative, nor does my Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles (2013). Tongva Park in Santa Monica was dedicated in 2013, a 1-acre site in Altadena was set aside as a Tongva homeland in 2022, the Tongva Sacred Springs in West LA is pictured above, and a 2023 Wikipedia entry for “Tongva,” while it mentions the Kizh Nation in passing, refers to Tongva as “the most widely circulated” name for LA’s Indigenous people and presents the map below as reinforcement.

Wikipedia’s map of “Southern CA Native American Tribal Territories,” 2022 (courtesy Native Land [.CA] 501c3)

It took me until 2019 to learn that another name for the local Indians even existed, when I happened upon one of Poyorena-Miguel’s presentations at the Eagle Rock Historical Society. And the timing was ripe, for the pro-Kizh/anti-Tongva case had been bolstered in the meantime through the research of Gary Stickel, a PhD in anthropology from UCLA, whose work on the issue, published in 2016, contends the following:

The first peoples of the Los Angeles basin did not have pan-tribal names as did plains tribes such as the Cherokee or Navajo. They identified instead with their local settlements, several of whose names we’ve retained today, with slightly different spelling, such as Topangna, Cahuengna, Tujungna, and Cucamongna. The Spaniards’ use of Kizh for the local Indians is evident in numerous documents besides the mission records: from a U.S. naval “exploring expedition” in 1846, to a U.S. War Department “Report on the Indian Tribes” in 1855, to British philological society reports in 1856 and 1860, to scholar Lewis H. Morgan’s Smithsonian Institution’s “Contributions to Knowledge” essay of 1871, and last not least to articles from two of America’s premier early anthropologists, Hubert Howe Bancroft in 1883 and Alfred Kroeber in 1907.[4]

As for Tongva’s origins, ethnographer C. Hart Merriam is the sole referent, and a wobbly one at that. According to Stickel, Merriam’s handwritten, never-published field notes, gathered in 1905, based Tongva on a (possibly mis-transcribed) name given by a lone Gabrieleño informant, Mrs. James Rosemyre (née Narcisa Higuera). Merriam thought Tongva to be a tribal language, and not even of the Gabrieleños but of a tribe in the Fort Tejon region north of Los Angeles where the informant then resided.[5] The aforementioned Cindi Alvitri, professor of American Indian Studies at Cal-State Long Beach, came upon Merriam’s notes in the 1980s and, eager to establish a more authentic local Indian identity, ran with it.

The Tongva name’s suspect etymology was underscored in the California state recognition accorded the Gabrielinos in 1994. While the initial assembly resolution recognized “the Gabrielino-Tongva Nation as the aboriginal tribe of the Los Angeles Basin,” Tongva was dropped in the final resolution due to insufficient documentation.[6] And according to independent historical consultant and researcher Joe Castillo, four subsequent attempts to include Tongva in negotiations for federal recognition similarly failed for the same reason.[7]

Yet despite this contravening evidence, the Tongva legend lives on. As for the dissension in the ranks, according to Julia Bogany, Cultural Officer of the slash group, the number of Tongva-named groups had mushroomed by 2019 to “at least ten.”[8]

The Kizh Nation, meanwhile, though it has long been marginalized and seemed out of contention in the high-stakes renaming game, like the legendary racehorse Silky Sullivan, has started closing in.

On October 14, 2023, the Los Angeles Times featured a cover story about an ongoing “Los Angeles Landscape History Project,” whose goal is to map “the major settlements and the roads that connected them . . . across the Los Angeles basin and beyond.” Among those working on the ambitious, 3-year project is “an unlikely partnership of three tribes—Chumash, Tataviam, and Kizh-Gabrieleño—as well as geographers, historians, biologists, and computer scientists from USC, UCLA, and Cal State Northridge, Los Angeles and Long Beach campuses.”

The article leans heavily on Andy Salas, chairperson of the Kizh-Gabrieleño tribe, which the Times had previously shunned, while Tongva, which the paper had previously taken for granted as the accepted name, is nowhere to be found. Then the topper, a map the article prominently displays, showing some of the early settlements and routes and the 3 contiguous tribes that traversed them:

Without question, then, Kizh has arrived! Whether it’ll have a better chance than Tongva to finally gain federal recognition, is not for me to say. Andy Salas, whose Kizh Nation has an application pending, believes the brass ring is within reach and “it’s going to happen in my lifetime.”[9]

Let’s hope.

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NOTES

[1] Quoted in Claudia Jurmain and William McCawley, O, My Ancestor: Recognition and Renewal for the Gabrielino-Tongva People of the Los Angeles Area (Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2009), 5. 

[2] Quoted in Jurmain and McCawley, O My Ancestor, 181-182.

[3] 2019 Eagle Rock Historical Society lecture and phone conversation with Andy Salas, chairperson of the Kizh Nation (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians).

[4] E. Gary Stickel, “Why the Original Indian Tribe of the Greater Los Angeles Area Is Called Kizh not Tongva” (San Gabriel, CA: Kizh Tribal Press, 2016).

[5] Andy Salas speculates that Merriam may have inadvertently misspelled his Gabrieleño informant’s word “Toviscangna.” Wikipedia’s 2023 “Tongva” entry claims that Merriam got his information from “numerous informants.”

[6] “The Evolution of the Tongva Tribal Name: An Independent Study by Joe Castillo: Historical Consultant and Researcher,” October 2018, 1.

[7] My phone interviews with Andy Salas, April 22, 2019, and Joe Castillio, April 23, 2019.

[8] My phone interview with Julia Bogany, April 17, 2019.

[9] Quoted in Louis Sahagún and Sean Greene, “Mapping L.A.’s ancient ‘suburbs,’” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 2023, A1, A12; A12.