Tataviam Erotic

The Tataviam are the people of the upper Santa Clara River. Their homeland is a dry country of canyons, chaparral and oak flats on the northern edge of Los Angeles, and today it holds Santa Clarita, Castaic, Agua Dulce and Piru. Their territory was small by California standards, but it sat at a crossroads. Chumash villages lay downriver to the west, Kitanemuk and Serrano communities lay to the north and east, and Tongva settlements lay to the south in the San Fernando Valley. Even their name came from neighbors. Tataviam is a Kitanemuk word usually translated as "people facing the sun." Early ethnographers also called them Alliklik, a name taken from the Chumash.

Their own language has nearly vanished from the record. What survives is a short list of words and phrases written down in the early twentieth century from a man at Piru who remembered only pieces of it. Most linguists read those fragments as Takic, the branch of Uto-Aztecan that includes Serrano and Kitanemuk. That would set the Tataviam apart from the unrelated Chumash languages next door, but the evidence is thin, and the question is still argued over.

Daily life followed a hard, seasonal landscape. Acorns, wild seeds and roasted chaparral yucca were staples, and deer, rabbits and other game filled out the diet. Villages clustered near dependable water along the river and its side canyons. Archaeological sites around Vasquez Rocks remain some of the most visible traces of that life. Little of their ceremonial world was written down before the missions displaced it.

That displacement came quickly. Mission San Fernando Rey de España was founded in 1797, and within a generation most Tataviam had been baptized and drawn into the mission system. There they lived and married alongside Tongva, Chumash, Serrano and Kitanemuk converts, and the Spanish lumped all of them together as Fernandeños. When the missions were secularized in the 1830s, the land did not go back to them. It passed to Mexican ranchos, and later gold prospectors and oil drillers worked the same canyons.

Tataviam descent did not end there. The Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, headquartered in the city of San Fernando, traces its citizens to mission-era village lineages from this region. The band is not federally recognized and has sought recognition for years. It also speaks for ancestral sites in a homeland now covered by subdivisions, freeways and movie ranches.