Tongva Erotic

The Tongva are the Indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin, and their village names are still bolted to the freeway signs of a city that mostly does not know whose they were. Cahuenga, Cucamonga, Pacoima, Topanga, Tujunga, Azusa: that ending is a Tongva locative meaning roughly "place of." Their country ran from the Santa Monica Mountains down past the San Gabriel Valley to the coast, and out across open water to the southern Channel Islands, Pimu, Kinkipar and Haraasnga, known now as Santa Catalina, San Clemente and San Nicolas. The reach across that channel mattered. Tongva crews built plank canoes called ti'at, sewn with cordage and caulked with asphaltum, and ran them between the islands and the mainland carrying steatite quarried on Catalina: cooking bowls, comals, small carved effigies. Soapstone from those quarries turns up at sites hundreds of miles inland. The language is Takic, a branch of Uto-Aztecan that ties the Tongva to the Serrano, Cahuilla and Luiseño next door and, at a much greater distance, to Nahuatl.

Religious life centered on Chengiichngech, a figure who was lawgiver and enforcer at once, whose observance spread through the region in the years around contact and whose initiations involved toloache, a preparation of datura. Then came Mission San Gabriel in 1771, and with it forced labor, disease and a new name: the Spanish called everyone attached to that mission Gabrileño. In 1785 a medicine woman named Toypurina helped organize a revolt against the mission and was exiled north for it. The name "Tongva" itself entered print only around 1903, taken down from a single speaker, Narcisa Higuera. Some families use Kizh instead, and the disagreement is not pedantry, since it tracks the several separate organizations that carry the community today. None of them holds federal recognition. What holds instead is ground: Puvungna at Cal State Long Beach, defended through decades of construction fights; the springs at Kuruvungna, still running under a West Los Angeles high school; and an acre in Altadena handed to a Tongva land conservancy in 2022, the first land the people had held in the county in nearly two centuries. The language is being rebuilt on a similar footing, taught from field notes and mission records rather than passed down unbroken, in classes run by community members for community members.