Mondo's NAT #571

Native American Tribes series.

Tongva

While several bands of Indians are thought to have traversed the lands now comprising the Puente Hills Preserve, these lands, once known by the name Awing-na (or Ahwiinga), served as the major homeland of the Tongva Indians. Historically, the tribe has also been known as the Gabrielinos because of the incorporation of much of their population into Mission San Gabriel in the late eighteenth century. Since Spanish missionaries imposed that name upon them it carries negative connotations to many in the tribe today, so descendants of this people have reverted to using their original name.

In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo led the first European expedition to explore what is now the west coast of the United States. He sailed up the California coast and landed on Catalina Island, making the first recorded contact between the Spanish people and the Tongva Indians, a semi-nomadic coastal hunter-gatherer tribe that, at the time, populated a territory covering almost 4,000 miles including both of the offshore islands now known as Santa Catalina and San Clemente, part of Orange County, and most of modern day Los Angeles County. These lands in turn provided food and shelter for a population of nearly 5,000 people. The Tongva traveled among other tribes on foot and also by canoes, called ti’ats, which could hold 15 people and were specially designed and crafted by their artisans out of large wooden planks. Through fragments of pottery, taken in trade from those areas, archeologists have been able to calculate Tongva presence in the area dating to 7th, 8th or 9th century B.C.E.

The Tongva believed in one god, whose sacred name of Qua-o-ar or Chingichngish they rarely uttered.   In common speech they would refer to Y-yo-ha-rivg-nain, which translated to The Giver of Life. This supreme being organized the universe and laid it out on the shoulders of seven giants. The Tongva creation story matched that of the Christians in that it concerned a first man and woman, Tobohar and Pabavit, and the fact that Qua-o-ar lived in a heaven-like location, receiving the souls of all who die.
In the late 1760s, the Spaniards in California began to fear further encroachment on their territory by Russian fur traders in the northern parts of modern-day California.   To curb the Russian advance, the Spaniards established a set of missions to bring Christianity to the new peoples they encountered, making them honorable, and taxable, subjects of the Spanish crown before the Russians could claim them and the territory they held.

Today the Tongva tribe has taken on the dual task of both reviving their culture and gaining federal recognition that would lead to benefits in education and health care.