Before the Southland gave way to sprawling suburban rooftops and hissing lawns. Before the great arterial freeways that crisscross the landscape with the promise of going from anywhere to anywhere. Before the vast flood control systems and aqueducts made it all possible. Even before successive waves of Spaniards, Mexicans, and then the Americans overtook and harnessed the land we call the LA basin. . .. there were the Kizh.
Pronounced Keeche, and with a distinct language well distributed over the landscape across the LA basin and the island-hopping waterways along the coast, the Kizh people were a loosely banded grouping of native villages, often related by blood. Industrious and commerce-minded traders who ventured far to trade and develop complicated cultural alliances with other indigenous bands, while constantly adapting to the land and the perennially swollen waterways of the LA basin. They prospered in around an environment in balanced with nature- a kind of original California Dream. Subsequent colonizers however altered that landscape forever.
But the memory of those indigenous peoples, before the hand of the colonizer transformed the land and displaced its peoples, was captured and represented in conversation with two direct descendants of the original Kizh people who are still living and adapting to an ever challenging cultural and political landscape today. Identified as Gabrielenos, Tribal Chief Andy Salas and tribal biologist Mathew Teutimez carry the blood lines and the message of the Kizh people to public audiences across California. They recently presented their history and their current tribal challenges to a well-attended audience at the Los Alamitos museum.
Assisted by a constant flow of pictorial representations and historical documents displayed on an overhead screen Chief Andy and biologist Mathew painted for the audience a bucolic image of indigenous life on the savannahs and along the marshy reed lands and waterways of the LA Basin, and made their case for the direct lineage that ties the Kizh peoples to the Gabrielenos of today.
Both speakers were born and raised in the area of once Gabrieleno lands. From Malibu Creek to the San Gabriel Mountains, from Whittier to Los Alamitos, Kizh villages prospered. And, like many among the tribe, Andy and Mathew are directly related. They spoke of their own family heritage and customs handed down over many generations, all by the oral traditions they practice today. Their connection to ancestral Kizh culture and its influence on contemporary LA landscape can be seen in the development of the LA Basin in general. One example being the pattern of our roads and highways today, beyond the simple naming of streets and towns.
As Andy Salas pointed out to a full house of Museum docents and patrons, entire freeway and rail systems in So Cal were surveyed and built on an overlay of practical indigenous travel routes laid out by local indigenous traders long before Serra, Portola and Anza’s first expeditions.
Salas goes so far as to say if the Spaniards had not had the well-ordered trails and established trade routes of the first peoples to follow, “they’d still be in East LA eating out of taco trucks and looking for a route North to San Francisco.”
The historic Los Alamitos Volunteer Fire Department water tower stands 4 stories majestically overlooking the main thoroughfares of the city.
On a more serious note, Salas and his university trained biologist co-presenter Mathew Teutimez make the ecological point that modern American engineers might have done well to heed the more collaborative way local Kizh people coexisted with mother nature and her periodic floods that inundated particularly what is now this area of Orange County rather than attempt to harness every overflowing waterway into a channeled rush to the sea. As Teutimez notes, “It’s supposed to flood here. . . . now almost all of our waterways are contaminated, whereas for thousands of years our ancestors enjoyed those rivers to fish and fresh water to drink. Now we have neither.” Similar departures from nature we are only beginning to see the cost of, he notes, such as our ill-conceived forestry management policies of the last 100 years.
In their all too short hourlong presentation at the museum on behalf of the Gabrieleno Tribe Salas and Teutimez gave us a glimpse into a world that once existed right here where we live- literally on top of the bones and relics of past peoples whose stewardship of the land still resonate as cautionary lessons for us today. Where the City of Los Alamitos now stands Mathew illustrated with renderings and maps the once thriving Kizh village of Puvunga ( in the Kizh vernacular the place of the cottonwood), one of a chain of indigenous communities north to Whittier Narrows who prospered along the freshwater tributaries that fed the San Gabriel River wetlands. Marshlands that once provided his ancestors all the resources they needed to thrive, and to replenish the soil and the water. Those wetlands are all but gone.
Teutimez spoke of attempts by his tribe collectively, and he as a biologist professionally, to re-educate and reintroduce natural local plant-based solutions for repairing some of the damage done by a century of urban sprawl and “modern” habitat management. Through his tribal nonprofit Laboratory for Indigenous Knowledge the ancient ways of local plant and arboreal uses for medicinal and ecological healing are being studied and applied by Mathew and his team to practical bioremediation projects, hopefully he adds, before they are lost to the modern world entirely.
Fortunately, this talk at least has been preserved on Los Al TV-3. Producer John Underwood was there to record highlights of the two Gabrielenos’ presentation airing now on Channel 3 cable TV, and on the website losaltv.org. Additional post presentation interview footage with the two gentlemen elaborating on Gabrieleno traditions and current tribal recognition efforts is also available on the website.
Included in this Los Al TV program called The Gabrielenos recorded at the museum, is a short dedication and city recognition for the museum’s newly restored old fire department water tower, transformed into a working clock tower that can be viewed from the Los Alamitos Boulevard. And yes, it does keep accurate time! See both presentations in this hour-long program on Los Al TV nightly at 5pm and at 8pm. The program can also be viewed on ROKU, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire platforms.