The Tongva and the Palos Verdes Bluffs, Seven Thousand Years

The bluffs you are looking at have been occupied continuously for at least seven thousand one hundred years. That date comes from excavations at a site on the Palos Verdes Peninsula called Chowigna, where archaeologists found evidence of human habitation that places people on these headlands long before the Tongva's own ancestors are believed to have arrived in coastal Southern California, and before the Egyptian pyramids were constructed, before bronze-casting reached the Mediterranean, before any of the civilizations a Western education typically presents as ancient history.

The Tongva held a territory that encompassed roughly four thousand square miles, including the entire Los Angeles basin, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and the Southern Channel Islands. They were a maritime people, builders of plank canoes called tomols, who crossed the open water between the mainland and the islands in vessels that scholars compare favorably to Pacific outrigger canoes in their design and seaworthiness. The coves and headlands of this peninsula were fishing grounds, gathering places, and village sites whose names in the Tongva language have been almost entirely lost.

What happened to the Tongva is a familiar California story compressed into a short period: Spanish missionization beginning at San Gabriel in seventeen seventy-one; epidemic disease for which the population had no immunity; forced labor at the missions; the erasure of land rights first by Spanish colonial law, then Mexican law, then American law, each transfer legal under the sovereign conducting it and catastrophic to the people whose prior presence it chose not to recognize. The Gabrieleno Tongva Nation today is not federally recognized. That status means no formal land rights, constrained access to cultural preservation funding, and a legal standing that the federal government has declined to grant despite the Tongva having lived on this peninsula for more than three hundred times the length of California statehood.

The headlands are still here. The bluffs still drop to the same water. The archaeology is in institutions across the city. The people never left.