Our Team
Staff
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Cheyenne Reynoso (Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Mexican descent, she/her)is the TTPC’s Administrative Coordinator. She recently obtained her Master’s in American Indian Studies from UCLA. Her thesis focuses on the creation and transformational work of The Tongva Taraxat Paxaava Conservancy and Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. She will be a legal apprentice with the Land Clinic training to become a lawyer in Tovaangar focusing on landback.
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Ian Schiffer (kuuy/guest, he/they) is the TTPC’s Resource Mobilizer and land return practitioner. Through relationship and on teams, he works to support release of resources and return of land in service of rematriation. He will be becoming a lawyer through apprenticeship with the Land Clinic to support the TTPC’s legal needs.
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Jay Lamars (Tongva, he/him) is the newest addition to the TTPC’s staff as our Manager of Social Media. He is a photographer/filmmaker and multi-faceted artist. In the summer of 2023, he joined the Paddle to Muckleshoot journey as a Tiat crew member and documentary filmmaker. With an upcoming documentary on the way, he will be at the helm of our social media channels and is designing the website you're looking at now!
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Board of Directors
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Wallace Cleaves (Tongva, he/him) is the President and co-founder of the TTPC, Associate Professor of Teaching, Director of the CA Center for Native Nations, and Associate Writing Program Director at UCR. He has served in many positions on the Tribal Council and the Kuruvungna Springs Foundation. He wrote an article called “Native Land Acknowledgments Are Not the Same As Land.”
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Charles Sepulveda studies California Indian histories with a focus on the mission system’s enslavement of Native peoples and their resistance. He earned his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UCR and held previous appointments at Cal Poly Pomona and the University of Utah. He received the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rematriation Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Sepulveda’s first book, Native Alienation: Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions, will be published by the University of Washington Press in 2024. His next manuscript will examine the environmental devastation to Southern California’s riparian ecosystem and the efforts to rematriate land/water into a relationship beyond heteropatriarchy. His article, “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility,” offered guests the opportunity to radically alter their relations to place. Sepulveda is a board member of the Acjachemen Tongva Land Conservancy and the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy.
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Tony Lassos (Tongva, he/him) is the Treasurer of the TTPC. He was raised and lives on his ancestral homelands in the village of Kuukaamonga also known today as Rancho Cucamonga. In addition to his responsibilities as treasurer, he works as a General Manager for a National Department Store chain. Tony is working to ensure that the next generation of Tongva peoples have a safe place where they can gather, learn about their culture and privately practice ceremony. He hopes to uplift and carry on the legacy that his Aunt Barbra Drake has left behind.
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