The Tongva (/ˈtɒŋvə/ TONG-və) are an Indigenous people of California from the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands, an area covering approximately 4,000 square miles (10,000 km2).

The act of 1968 stated that the Secretary of the Interior would distribute an equal share of the award to the individuals on the judgment roll “regardless of group affiliation.”[40] Many lines of evidence suggest that the Tongva are descended from Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples who originated in what is now Nevada, and moved southwest into coastal Southern California 3,500 years ago.

The majority of Tongva territory was located in what has been referred to as the Sonoran life zone, with rich ecological resources of acorn, pine nut, small game, and deer.

[48] On October 7, 1542, an exploratory expedition led by Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo reached Santa Catalina in the Channel Islands, where his ships were greeted by Tongva in a canoe.

Proximity to the missions created mass tension for Native Californians, which initiated "forced transformations in all aspects of daily life, including manners of speaking, eating, working, and connecting with the supernatural.

"[3] As stated by scholars John Dietler, Heather Gibson, and Benjamin Vargas, "Catholic enterprises of proselytization, acceptance into a mission as a convert, in theory, required abandoning most, if not all, traditional lifeways."

[3] For example, Mission San Gabriel's Father Zalvidea punished suspected shamans "with frequent flogging and by chaining traditional religious practitioners together in pairs and sentencing them to hard labor in the sawmill.

[51] Carey McWilliams characterized it as follows: "the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps...."[52] There is much evidence of Tongva's resistance to the mission system.

[3] When questioned about the attack, Toypurina is famously quoted as saying that she participated in the instigation because “[she hated] the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains.

… I came [to the mission] to inspire the dirty cowards to fight, and not to quail at the sight of Spanish sticks that spit fire and death, nor [to] retch at the evil smell of gunsmoke – and be done with you white invaders!’[53] Scholars have debated the accuracy of this quote, from Thomas Workman Temple II's article “Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel” suggesting it may differ significantly from the testimony recorded by Spanish authorities at the time.

Soldiers watched, ready to hunt down any who tried to escape.” Writing in 1852, Reid said he knew of Tongva who “had an ear lopped off or were branded on the lip for trying to get away.”[54] In 1810, the "Gabrieleño" labor population at the mission was recorded to be 1,201.

[12] As stated by scholar Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, "while they should have been owners, the Tongva became workers, performing strenuous, back-breaking labor just as they had done ever since settler colonialism emerged in Southern California.

"[12] As recorded by Hernández, "Tongva men and women, along with an increasingly diverse set of their Native neighbors, filled the jail and convict labor crews in Mexican Los Angeles.

Some of the people were displaced to small Mexican and Native communities in the Eagle Rock and Highland Park districts of Los Angeles as well as Pauma, Pala, Temecula, Pechanga, and San Jacinto.

Most spent their days working on the county chain gang, which was largely involved with keeping the city streets clean in the 1850s and 1860s but increasingly included road construction projects as well.

An 1852 editorial in the Los Angeles Star revealed the public's anger towards any possibility of the Gabrieleño receiving recognition and exercising sovereignty:[10]To place upon our most fertile soil the most degraded race of aborigines upon the North American Continent, to invest them with the rights of sovereignty, and to teach them that they are to be treated as powerful and independent nations, is planting the seeds of future disaster and ruin... We hope that the general government will let us alone – that it will neither undertake to feed, settle or remove the Indians amongst whom we in the South reside, and that they leave everything just as it now exists, except affording us the protection which two or three cavalry companies would give.In 1852, Hugo Reid wrote a series of letters for the Los Angeles Star from the center of the Gabrieleño community in San Gabriel township, describing Gabrieleño life and culture.

[10] In 1859, amidst increasing criminalization and absorption into the city's burgeoning convict labor system, the county grand jury declared "stringent vagrant laws should be enacted and enforced compelling such persons ['Indians'] to obtain an honest livelihood or seek their old homes in the mountains."

She reported that there were a considerable number of people "in the colonies in the San Gabriel Valley, where they live like gypsies in brush huts, here today, gone tomorrow, eking out a miserable existence by days' work."

I didn’t even get their names.”[54] Historians and contemporary Tongva advocates have argued that Anglo-American institutions, including schools and museums, have historically challenged the preservation of tribal identity throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

[22] In 2019, CSU, Long Beach dumped trash and dirt on top of Puvunga in its construction of new student housing, which reawakened a decades-long dispute between the university and the tribe over the treatment of the sacred site.

Villages were located throughout four major ecological zones, as noted by biologist Matthew Teutimez: interior mountains and foothills, grassland/oak woodland, sheltered coastal canyons, and the exposed coast.

They fished and hunted in the estuary of the Los Angeles River, and like the Chumash, their neighbors to the north and west along the Pacific coast, the Gabrieleño built seaworthy plank canoes, called te'aat, from driftwood.

The Gabrieleño regularly paddled their canoes to Catalina Island, where they gathered abalone,[72] which they pried off the rocks with implements made of fragments of whale ribs or other strong bones.

Those villages located on the coast during the summer went on food collecting trips inland during the winter rainy season to gather roots, tubers, corms, and bulbs of plants including cattails, lilies, and wild onions.

Another favored Tongva food was the seed kernel of a species of plum (prunus ilicifolia (common name: holly-leaf cherry) they called islay, which was ground into meal and made into gruel.

), grass (Muhlenbergia rigens), and squawbush (Rhus trilobata), women fabricated coiled and twined basketry in a three-color pattern for household use, seed collecting, and ceremonial containers to hold grave offerings.

[76] Living in the mild climate of southern California, the men and children usually went nude, and women wore only a two-piece skirt, the back part being made from the flexible inner bark of cottonwood or willow, or occasionally deerskin.

[94] According to Father Gerónimo Boscana, relations between the Chumash, Gabrieleños, Luiseños, and Diegueños, as he called them, were generally peaceful but “when there was a war it was ferocious…no quarter was given, and no prisoners were taken except the wounded.”[94] The earliest ethnological surveys of the Christianized population of the San Gabriel area, who were then known by the Spanish as Gabrielino, were conducted in the mid-19th century.

They have had strong internal disagreements about governance and their future, largely related to plans supported by some members to open a gaming casino on land that would be considered part of the Gabrieleño/Tongva's homeland.

In October 2019, following the dumping of soil, along with concrete, rebar and other debris, on "land that holds archaeological artefacts actively used by local Tribal groups for ceremonies"[107] from a nearby construction site, the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation–Belardes (an organization that self-identifies as a Native American tribe), and the California Cultural Resource Preservation Alliance (CCRPA) filed a lawsuit against the university.