Guashna

[8][9] Tar was reportedly an important resource of Guashna, which was used in trade with numerous neighboring villages and for the Tongva's production of te'aats to navigate the coastline.

Tongva's prosperous villages on the island would trade quarried soapstone, pierced white shell, abalone, and sea otter skins.

The villagers were brought to Mission San Gabriel,[6] where they were baptized and forced to work in conditions that were identified by third-party observers as being slavery "in every sense of the word.

"[1] Mission registers of the era show a number of entries for people from Guasna and Guashna, or Guaspet, Guachpet, or Guashpet (-pet being a suffix that indicated someone was a person from a certain place.

From them the brown-skinned men went forth to gather clams and shell fish at the beach beyond the lagoon, to hunt small game in the marshes and to find edible berries, seeds and insects in the river growth and on hillside shrubs...The work of the ranch was done by the local Indians, one group of whom had their huts among the sycamores not far from Augustin's home [north of the creek at Overland, facing what is now Jefferson], another group having their village against the cliffs beneath the present-day Loyola University.The village is identified as Gaucha on George W. Kirkman's Pictorial and Historical Map of Los Angeles County from 1938.

Developments increasingly encroached on the agricultural area where the village site was located as Los Angeles sprawled outward.

[6] In 2004, the construction of a drainage ditch for the Playa Vista development unearthed four hundred ancestral remains or burials in the area.

Monument to Guashna at Ballona Discovery Park in the Playa Vista neighborhood.
Tar was used in the construction of plank boats known as te'aats or tomols (pictured) unique to the Tongva and Chumash as the only seafaring vessels of their kind along the West Coast .
Detail of Bernice Johnston's 1962 map showing Gabrieleño settlements in the Ballona watershed, including what she called "Sa'angna," as well as Koruu'vanga to the north and 'Ongoova'nga along the coast to the south
Two different versions of the diseño for Rancho La Ballona label the Westchester Bluffs as Gaucho, a name researchers have connected to Guashna
UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library holds a copy of Rancho Sausal Redondo diseño that shows the predecessor grant Rancho Gauspita was to the north, above the Bayona on the way to Sentinela , and Rancho Salinas was to the south (roughly Hermosa Beach )
Howard Hughes centered his airport buildings around an allée of native Western sycamores ; their trunk circumferences suggest they date to the early 19th century