person sitting and posing in traditional native american clothing

This map shows at least 62 different tribes in California prior to European contact

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The map is courtesy of the Northern California Indian Development Council, which has provided resources for American Indian communities since 1976. According to the U.S. Library of Congress:

“The earliest Californians were adventurous Asians who made their way across the Bering Straits to Alaska thousands of years ago when a warmer climate and a now-vanished land bridge made such travel easier. These men and women and their descendants settled North and South America, spreading out to form the various nations and tribes whom the first European visitors to this hemisphere dubbed ‘Indians.’ The mountain ranges of the Pacific Coast isolated these early settlers from the cultures that developed in neighboring Mexico and the western United States.”

Source: Northern California Indian Development Council.

There were at least six unique language networks in what would become California. In the L.A. basin area, the Gabrieleño, Tongva, or Kizh nation is noted as part of a network which spoke an “Uto-Aztecan” language.

In early 2024, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is set to return 40 acres to the Pauite-Shoshone people in the Owens Valley in the department’s first ever such move.

In the “Southland,” 2023 also saw an Indigenous Charter School in El Sereno purchase 12 acres of land on behalf of the Gabrieleño Shoshone Tribal Nation to establish what will one day be known as the Chief Ya’anna Learning Village.

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J.T.

Preserving Los Angeles Is Critical to Our History

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IMG_2075
L.A. Times Building; J.T., 2015

This past June all L.A. Times staff and personnel moved from the historic L.A. Times building in downtown Los Angeles to a new headquarters in El Segundo after the Times’s lease expired with the building’s owners at the end of the month. The building was sold by Tribune Media, the former owners of the L.A. Times, to the Canadian real estate Onni Group in 2016.

Now The L.A. Times building as it stands on 1st and Spring street is slated for a seismic redevelopment if the Onni group has its way, as the firm looks to convert the 1973 Pereira installment of the building into a high-rise residential and retail space.

Preservationists have called on the L.A. City Council to grant a landmark status to the structure, the cornerstones of which were erected in 1937, but even if approved, the specter of demolition of at least some of the structure will still loom large. The city council can ‘encourage’ or incentivize the Onni group about how to move forward with its redevelopment plans, but the firm is not known for its preservation records. What a show of the power of ownership in the face of the public interest.

When I visited Chicago in the summer of 2016 it was an eerie sight to observe an absolutely empty Tribune building in the middle of the city’s highly developed downtown area. Now, as our very own media company here on the West coast meets the same fate, the swiftness with which modernization undermines the foundations of our institutions dawns once again. And yet, Los Angeles does not have to go the way of Chicago. If the city’s leadership can consider the long-term benefits of preserving this piece of our local history, future generations just may get to experience the magnitude of the structure for themselves.

Indeed, when much of the leadership in California likes to tout the state as a beacon of forward-mindedness, the act of preserving our history should be a no-brainer. And if L.A. Times reporting and storytelling has shown me anything over the years, it’s that someone is always paying attention to the movements swirling through our society, and that the more we can place the parcels such movements leave behind into perspective, the more fully we can grasp just where we come from and thus know ourselves better.

Moreover, this same forward-mindedness, or respect for both present and future, is what many of the movements against gentrification in cities like Los Angeles are also centered around: to resist displacement for the sake of chic new markets is not just to be facetious, it is to herald what is already here, what is already provided by what’s (t)here, and what might still be borne from its preservation when measured not by market values, but human values.

J.T.