LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Silver Lake Reservoirs Conservancy and the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council acknowledge all of the original stewards and inhabitants of the Los Angeles Basin, or Tovaangar, and their descendants. We pay tribute to the Gabrielino-Tongva (Toviscanga) people who lived and cared for Yaanga & Maawnga—the lands which include present day Silver Lake—as well as the Kizh, Chumash, & Fernandeno-Tataviam Band who also inhabited Tovaangar. As constituents of Silver Lake, we vow to make decisions mindfully and with effort to preserve the ancestral land of the Tongva, the ‘People of the Earth,’ in a sustainable and respectful manner. We will continuously strive to collaborate with and listen to members of the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe and descendants of all first peoples of Los Angeles when acting as representatives of this community. 

History of First Peoples in Silver Lake

The Gabrielino-Tongva tribe have been indigenous to the region of Los Angeles for over 7000 years. Before Spanish colonization, it is said that over 350,000 people inhabited what is now the state of California3 and 5,000 to 10,000 Gabrieleño-Tongva lived in Tovaangar (the Los Angeles Basin) when the first Spanish settlers arrived in 1781. The tribe is named after the San Gabriel Mission founded in 1771 as well as the Tongva people (meaning “people of the land”). It is also said that some of the Gabrielino people would go by the endonym Kizh. These indigenous people inhabited Silver Lake and its surrounding region in several main centers of commerce and residence, one of which being Yaanga, where downtown Los Angeles currently resides. The other, Maawnga, is where the city of Glendale lies and also borders on what was taken over as Rancho Los Feliz in 1795 and subsequently made the neighborhood of present-day Los Feliz. In the 1500’s, Spanish settlers came to the region and enslaved and decimated the native populations. Native people were further impacted by the Portola expedition in 1769 which led to the inception of Mission San Gabriel. Less than a century later, the 1851 Indian Appropriations Act made it legal to forcefully displace Indigenous people onto reservations. Despite this legislation, and oppressive sanctions enacted around The Gold Rush, there are still several thousand Gabrielino-Tongva people living in Los Angeles County today. It took until 1994 for the State of California to recognize the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe, and to date there are more than 50 other tribes that have resided in Southern California that go unrecognized. Looking to the future, we have a commitment to be stewards of the land and to respect Tovaangar. Below are several resources to help us facilitate such a commitment and make a small step in respecting this native land.

RESOURCES

Gabrielino-Tongva Nation, San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians - https://www.gabrieleno-nsn.us/

UCLA: Mapping Indigenous L.A. - https://mila.ss.ucla.edu/

The UCLA American Indian Studies Center - https://aisc.it.ucla.edu/w/

Native Land Digital Map - https://native-land.ca/