Arts & Community
Last Update: 2/20/2025
This page is dedicated to our cultural bearers, the weavers, the builders, the storytellers, the Land stewards, Water protectors, Fire keepers, and all of our ancestors — past, present and emerging.
Here is a place for us to share the work, events and resources that continue the cultural Legacy of the Tongva Taraxat.
For submissions please email: Jay@Tongva.Land
Public Gathering: Fire Kinship
Image: Firing of Summer Herrera’s péshlish tó’xat pí’ piyévla (painted clay pottery in Payómkawichum language). Photo by Summer Herrera.
Special Event
February 22, 2025 | 6:00PM - 9:00PM
IN PERSON
You are invited to a public community gathering in honor of the exhibition Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art. Our second PST ART show, Fire Kinship challenges the attitudes of fear and illegality around fire, arguing for a return to Native practices in which fire is regarded as a vital aspect of land stewardship, community well-being, and tribal sovereignty. Highlighting the knowledge and expertise of the Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay peoples, the exhibition—on view through July 13, 2025—presents a living history of communities past and present.
The Fowler Museum mourns the tragic loss of life and devastation caused by Southern California wildfires. We are deeply grateful to firefighters, first responders, and tribal nations for their heroic efforts. In this critical moment, Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art offers valuable lessons in Indigenous fire stewardship and ecological resilience. We hope it will inspire reflection, healing, and sustainable rebuilding.
The evening will begin with a welcome from a local California Indian community, followed by a reception, and opportunity to view the exhibition and reflect on the role of fire stewardship in our communities.
Source: 2025 Fowler Museum.
Sand Acknowledgment in Action: Lazaro Arvizu Jr.
Image Courtesy of the Artist
February 23, 2025 | 1:30PM - 2:30PM
Concert / Performance, Talk / Lecture
IN PERSON
Sand Acknowledgment in action—accompanied by flute-playing and artist-facilitated meditation in the installation space—will focus on the meaning of the sand painting in the exhibition Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art.
Lazaro Arvizu Jr. is an artist, educator, musician, and researcher dedicated to the culture of the first people of Los Angeles. Born in the Los Angeles Basin, he is knowledgeable about the landscape and cosmology of the Gabrieleno culture. For over 20 years, he has facilitated creative and meaningful cultural experiences for people of all ages and walks of life, in many venues.
Source: 2025 Fowler Museum.
Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art
"CALIFORNIA NATIVE Dormidera #2: Modesta Avila," 2023, Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva and Scottish). Courtesy of the artist.
Exhibit
January 22 – July 13, 2025
Prior to Southern California’s colonization in the 18th century, Native communities throughout the region used controlled fire practices to ensure the vitality of their ecosystems. Fire Kinship counters the attitudes of fear and illegality around fire, arguing for a return to Native practices, in which fire is regarded as a vital aspect of land stewardship, community wellbeing, and tribal sovereignty. These conversations have been shaped by community leaders throughout Southern California. The baskets, ollas, rabbit sticks, bark skirts, and canoes in this exhibition were made possible through the relationship between people, place, and fire. Commissioned video, sculpture, portrait paintings, and installations by contemporary artists respond to and rejoin the cultural and historical objects. The exhibition presents a living history that centers the Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay communities and reintroduces fire as a generative element, one that connects us to our past and offers a path toward a sustainable future.
The baskets, ollas, rabbit sticks, bark skirts, and canoes presented in this exhibition were made possible through the relationship between people, place, and fire. Commissioned video, sculpture, portrait paintings, and installations by contemporary artists such as Weshoyot Alvitre (Tongva and Scottish), Emily Clarke (Cahuilla Band of Indians), Gerald Clarke Jr. (Cahuilla Band of Indians), Leah Mata Fragua (Yak Tityu Tityu Yak Tiłhini Northern Chumash), Summer Herrera (Payómkawichum), Lazaro Arvizu Jr. (Tongva), and Marlene’ Dusek (Payómkawichum, Kúupangawish, Kumeyaay, and Czech) respond to and rejoin the cultural and historical objects, spurring a dialogue of critique, reflection, and futurity. The exhibition presents a living history that centers the expertise of Tongva, Cahuilla, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay communities. Fire Kinship reintroduces fire as a generative element, one that connects us to our past and offers a collective path toward a sustainable future.
Source: 2025 Fowler Museum.
Publication/Literature
December 2024
Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions
Sites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region’s Indigenous peoples. Mainstream California history, however, still largely presents a romanticized portrait of the creation of the twenty-one Spanish missions between San Diego and Sonoma in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Providing a corrective to this benign historiography, Charles A. Sepulveda reconstructs the violence toward Native people as well the resistance and refusals of his ancestors and other Native people during and after the Spanish genocide.
The conquest enforced the attempted spiritual possession of Native souls and the physical position of Native bodies and the land. At the same time, it strengthened the Spanish view of California’s Indigenous people as disposable. Sepulveda demonstrates how enslavement was a key method of conquest, putting to rest the myth of the Spanish as benevolent and beneficial. Centering the experiences of Native peoples, Sepulveda brings to light the gendered dimensions of the conquest and genocide. His fuller history confronts the erasure of Indian individuality and resistance and historicizes the relationship between enslavement, dispossession, and environmental degradation. He also illuminates the mission system’s central role in destroying Indigenous people’s relationships to the land while examining the practice’s centuries-long impact on the lives of Native people.
A groundbreaking reconsideration, Native Alienation transforms our understanding of California Indian history.
Source: University of Washington Press
Indigenous Peoples Day Event
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2024
11am-4pm
12400 Big Tujunga Canyon Road, Tujunga, CA 91042
How can we honor, celebrate, uplift, and learn from our Indigenous Peoples? How can we, collectively, nurture the healing of devastating wounds caused by centuries of colonialism, land and cultural loss, and the erasure/invisibility of Indigenous Peoples? Tuxuunga, the “Place of the Old Woman”, of the beautiful un-ceded land of the Tongva, once again commits to reaffirming Indigenous Peoples, their culture, contributions, relationship to the land, and visionary leadership.
The event is organized by ST Forward with special guidance from Indigenous Culture Bearer and Advisor Tina Orduno Calderon, and support from the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA).
This cultural, educational, and community-centered celebration will be organized and shaped by the following key values:
Respect for the land
A focus on reciprocity
Relational educational opportunities
Cultural diversity
Generative dialogue
Special Event: Eyoomkuuka’ro Kokomaar
SAN FRANCISCO - In collaboration with Queer Cultural Center. Join us for a FREE event in San Francisco to learn about Native Californian traditional canoes. We will have live music, performances, and canoe rides for all ages. Cultural learning opportunities throughout the park, as well as kites! From 10 am - 4 pm.
more info:
https://bit.ly/EK-2024
Native Narratives: Tongva Traditions
Observe tradition being passed from one generation to the next as we see the LA River through the eyes of its original people, the Tongva. In searching for tule reed to construct a doll we learn about the ways Tongva people relied upon the River and how they paid respects to nature.
Tule and Its Many Gifts
Natural History Museum Los Angeles County
In this final installment of L.A. at Play: Dolls & Figurines, Morales Johnson graciously shares her ancestral knowledge on the making and meaning of traditional tule dolls. Click here to watch Morales Johnson explain her timeless connection to the city and lands of Los Angeles and the role of tule dolls in her culture.
From the Ground Up: How Tongva Traditions Utilize California Native Plants (video)
Maloof Teens interview members of California's Gabrielino Tongva community about history and culture represented by native plants on view in the Maloof Discovery Garden. Project was supported in part with a grant from California Humanities.
The Aqueduct Between Us is a five-part radical oral history documentary that aims to educate the people of Los Angeles about the history of water theft and urban development from an Indigenous perspective. The erasure of indigenous voices within the Los Angeles water narrative has been a perpetual social and environmental injustice that infringes upon the sovereignty of tribal communities in and around Los Angeles since the completion of the 233-mile-long Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. The city of Los Angeles and the Owens Valley have been intrinsically and physically linked by the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the detrimental environmental impact that it has had upon both areas. This documentary uplifts a variety of tribal community experts from Tovaangar and Payahuunadü (Owens Valley). Topics covered in the series include an introduction of each tribal community, their lifestyle precontract, and post-contact, shared colonial struggles, contemporary environmental injustice issues, and conservation/wealth disparities in Los Angeles, and concludes with ways for people to become better water allies.
Presentation by Ethnobotanist our Tongva Land Return Coordinator Samantha Morales Johnson
Native Land Acknowledgements are not the Same as Land Back
Article by Wallace Cleaves and Charles Sepulveda
How can cities meaningfully support Indigenous communities?
Four Tongva leaders discuss how Los Angeles and other cities can more actively and meaningfully support Indigenous communities in this panel discussion organized by the 3rd LA Series at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Though many institutions have adopted Indigenous land acknowledgement policies in recent years, native leaders frequently caution that these statements risk ringing hollow if they are not backed by a larger commitment to reparative work, land conservancy and co-management, and land return -- among other goals.
