The Kizh PeopleThe Kizh people are considered to be the most powerful indigenous group, number 5,000-10,000 at the time of European invasion. The Kizh are a Native American people that occupied the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Canals. They were a hunter-gatherer people that traded with locals tribes. They were the first people to contact Europeans when they came in the 16th Century. However, in 1771, Mission San Gabriel Acrangel was constructed. The Kizh were forced to retreat, became ill from disease, or were forced to assimilate ("convert"). Once they converted, they were basically turned to slaves to earn their keep. Once the Mexican government to possession of SGV, the land of the Mission San Gabriel Acrangel was partitioned and granted as ranchos to rancheros. The Kizh people were forced to assimilate. There are approximately 1,700 Kizh people present day. They are a people with a resilient story at the heart of SGV's history.
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You may have heard of the Kizh people being called Tongva people, but this is done in error. The Kizh did not become known as the Tongva until an ethnographer recorded the wrong name in error in the beginning 21st Century. For more information on the accurate name of the Kizh people and how they have come to be known as the Tongva people, click here.
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Kizh Culture
Pre-history
The territory which in historical times was occupied by the Kizh (pronounced "Keech", meaning "People of the willow houses") had been inhabited by Native Americans for more than 10,000 years. A prehistoric milling area estimated to be 8,000 years old was discovered in 2006 at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains near Azusa, California. The find yielded arrowheads, hearths and stone slabs used to grind seeds as well as tools and implements, but no human or animal bones. The Chowigna site in Palos Verdes, California, excavated in the 1930s, dates back 7,000 years.
In 2007 and early 2008, more than 174 human remains, some up to 8,500 years old, were unearthed by archaeologists at a development site of Brightwater Hearthside Homes in the Bolsa Chica Mesa area in Huntington Beach, California. This land was once shared by the Kizh and Acjachemem tribes. The site was in legal limbo for years before Hearthside was given permission to start construction of over 300 homes. The Kizh and Acjachemem Indians are in dispute over the remains and how to handle them.
As speakers of a language of the Uto-Aztecan family, the remote ancestors of the Kizh probably coalesced as a people in the Sonoran Desert, between perhaps 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. This was a center of that language family. The diversity within the Takic group is "moderately deep"; rough estimates by comparative linguists place the breakup of common Takic into the Luiseño-Juaneño on one hand, and the Kizh-Serrano on the other, at about 2,000 years ago. (This is comparable to the differentiation of the Romance languages of Europe). The division of the Kizh-Serrano group into the separate Kizh and Serrano peoples is more recent, and may have been influenced by Spanish missionary activity.
Mission period
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 Kizh (later referred to as "Gabrieleños") in a canoe. The following day, Cabrillo and his men, the first Europeans known to have interacted with the Gabrieleño people, entered a large bay on the mainland, which they named "Baya de los Fumos" on account of the many smoke fires they saw there. This is commonly believed to be San Pedro Bay, near present-day San Pedro.
Spanish Franciscan priests founded two missions in what is now Los Angeles County; the Gabrieleños lived in the area around Mission San Gabriel, founded in 1771, and the Fernandeños lived near Mission San Fernando, founded in 1797. Both groups have been designated as Gabrieleño. Although their language idioms were distinguishable, they did not diverge greatly, and it is possible there were as many as half a dozen dialects rather than the two which the existence of the missions has lent the appearance of being standard.
The demarcation of the Fernandeño and the Gabrieleño territories is mostly conjectural, and there is no known point in which the two groups differed markedly in customs. The wider Gabrieleño group occupied what is now Los Angeles County south of the Sierra Madre and half of Orange County, as well as the islands of Santa Catalina and San Clemente. At the Gabrieleño settlement of Yangna (Yaangna) along the Los Angeles River, missionaries and Indian neophytes, or baptized converts, built the first town of Los Angeles in 1781. It was called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola). In 1784, a sister mission, the Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia, was founded at Yaanga as well.
Culture
The Gabrieleño occupied the main part of the most fertile lowland of southern California, including a stretch of sheltered coast with a pleasant climate and abundant food resources, and the most habitable of the Santa Barbara Islands. They were perhaps the most culturally advanced group south of the Tehachapi, and the wealthiest of the Uto-Aztecan speakers in California, dominating other native groups culturally wherever contacts occurred. Many of the cultural developments of the surrounding southern peoples had their origin with the Gabrieleño.
Cultural Resources
The Gabrieleño people had a concentrated population along the 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. To build them, they used planks of driftwood pine that were sewn together with vegetable fiber cord, edge to edge, and then glued with the tar that was available either from the La Brea Tar Pits, or as asphalt that had washed up on shore from offshore oil seeps. The finished vessel was caulked with plant fibers and tar, stained with red ochre, and sealed with pine pitch. The te'aat, as noted by the Sebastián Vizcaíno expedition, could hold up to 20 people as well as their gear and trade goods.
These canoes allowed the development of trade between the mainland villages and the offshore islands, and were important to the region's economy and social organization, with trade in food and manufactured goods being carried on between the people on the mainland coast and people in the interior as well. The Gabrieleño regularly paddled their canoes to Catalina Island, where they gathered abalone, which they pried off the rocks with implements made of fragments of whale ribs or other strong bones.
The Gabrieleño proper called themselves kumi.vit. Their villages were located in places with accessible drinking water, protection from the elements, and productive areas where different ecological niches on the land intersected. Situating their villages at these resource islands enabled the Gabrieleño to gather the plant products of two or more zones in close proximity.
The Gabrieleño did not practice horticulture or agriculture, as their well-developed hunter-gatherer and trade economy provided adequate food resources. 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. The front apron was made of cords of twisted dog bane or milkweed. People went barefoot except in rough areas where they wore crude sandals made of yucca fiber. In cold weather, they wore robes or capes made from twisted strips of rabbit fur, deer skins, or bird skins with the feathers still attached. Also used as blankets at night, these were made of sea otter skins along the coast and on the islands.
Households consisted of a main house (kiiy) and temporary camp shelters used during food gathering excursions. In the summer, families who lived near grasslands collected roots, seeds, flowers, fruit, and leafy greens, and in the winter families who lived near chaparral shrubland collected nuts and acorns, yucca, and hunted deer. Some prairie communities moved to the coast in the winter to fish, hunt whales and elephant seals, and harvest shellfish. 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.
Men performed most of the heavy, short-duration labor; they hunted, fished, helped with some food-gathering, and carried on trade with other cultural groups. Large game animals were hunted with bow and arrows, and small game was taken with deadfall traps, snares, and bows made of buckeye wood. John P. Harrington recorded that the Gabrieleño used rattlesnake venom as an arrow poison. Burrowing animals were driven from their burrows with smoke and clubbed; communal rabbit drives were made during the seasonal controlled burning of chaparral on the prairie, the rabbits being killed with nets, bow and arrows, and throwing sticks.
The Gabrieleño used harpoons, spear-throwers, and clubs to hunt marine mammals. Fishing was done from shorelines or along rivers, streams, and creeks with hook and line, nets, basketry traps, spears, bow and arrows, and poisons made from plants. The women collected and prepared plant and some animal food resources and made baskets, pots, and clothing. In their old age, they and the old men cared for the young and taught them Gabrieleño lifeways.
Gabrieleño material culture and technology reflected a sophisticated knowledge of the working properties of natural materials and a highly developed artisanship, shown in many articles of everyday utility decorated with shell inlay, carving, and painting. Most of these items, including baskets, shell tools, and wooden weapons, were extremely perishable. Soapstone from quarries on Catalina Island was used to make cooking implements, animal carvings, pipes, ritual objects, and ornaments.
Using the stems of rushes (Juncus sp .), 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. They sealed some baskets, such as water bottles, with asphalt to make watertight containers for holding liquids.
The Gabrieleño used the leaves of tule reeds as well as those of cattails to weave mats and thatch their shelters. Bread was made from the yellow pollen of cattail heads, and the underground rhizomes were dried and ground into a starchy meal. The young shoots were eaten raw. The seeds of chia, a herbaceous plant of the sage family, were gathered in large quantities when they were ripe. The flower heads were beaten with a paddle over a tightly woven basket to collect the seeds. These were dried or roasted and ground into a flour called "pinole," which was often mixed with the flour of other ground seeds or grains. Water was added to make a cooling drink; mixing with less water yielded a kind of porridge that could be baked into cakes.
Acorn mush was a staple food of the Gabrieleños, as it was of all the Mission indigenous. Acorns were gathered in October; this was a communal effort with the men climbing the trees and shaking them while the women and children collected the nuts. The acorns were stored in large wicker granaries supported by wooden stakes well above the ground. Preparing them for food took about a week. Acorns were placed, one at a time, on end in the slight hollow of a rock and their shells broken by a light blow from a small hammerstone; then the membrane, or skin, covering the acorn meat was removed. Following this process the acorn meats were dried for days, after which the kernels were pounded into meal with a pestle. This was done in a stone mortar or in a mortar hole in a boulder. Large bedrock outcroppings near oak stands often display evidence of the community mills where the women labored.
The pounded acorn meal was put into baskets and the bitter tannic acid it contained was leached out to make the meal more palatable and digestible. The prepared meal was cooked by boiling in water in a watertight grass-woven basket or in a soapstone bowl into which heated stones were dropped. Soapstone casseroles were used directly over the fire. Various foods of meat, seeds, or roots were cooked by the same method. The mush thus prepared was eaten cold or nearly so, as was all their food. Another favored Gabrieleño food was the seed kernel of a species of plum (prunus ilicifolia) they called islay, which was ground into meal and made into gruel.
Reciprocity and sharing of resources were important values in Gabrieleño culture. Hugo Reid reported that the hoarding of food supplies was so stigmatized by the Gabrieleño moral code that hunters would give away large portions of coveted foods such as fresh meat, and that under some circumstances, hunters were prohibited from eating their own kill or fishermen from eating their own catch.
In the Gabrieleño economic system, food resources were managed by the village chief, who was given a portion of the yield of each day's hunting, fishing, or gathering to add to the communal food reserves. Individual families stored some food to be used in times of scarcity. The Gabrieleño territory was the center of a flourishing trade network that extended from the Channel Islands as far east as the Colorado River, allowing the Gabrieleño to maintain trade relations with the Cahuilla, Serrano, Luisenio, Chumash, and Mojave cultural groups. The information for this section was retrieved from this website.
The territory which in historical times was occupied by the Kizh (pronounced "Keech", meaning "People of the willow houses") had been inhabited by Native Americans for more than 10,000 years. A prehistoric milling area estimated to be 8,000 years old was discovered in 2006 at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains near Azusa, California. The find yielded arrowheads, hearths and stone slabs used to grind seeds as well as tools and implements, but no human or animal bones. The Chowigna site in Palos Verdes, California, excavated in the 1930s, dates back 7,000 years.
In 2007 and early 2008, more than 174 human remains, some up to 8,500 years old, were unearthed by archaeologists at a development site of Brightwater Hearthside Homes in the Bolsa Chica Mesa area in Huntington Beach, California. This land was once shared by the Kizh and Acjachemem tribes. The site was in legal limbo for years before Hearthside was given permission to start construction of over 300 homes. The Kizh and Acjachemem Indians are in dispute over the remains and how to handle them.
As speakers of a language of the Uto-Aztecan family, the remote ancestors of the Kizh probably coalesced as a people in the Sonoran Desert, between perhaps 3,000 and 5,000 years ago. This was a center of that language family. The diversity within the Takic group is "moderately deep"; rough estimates by comparative linguists place the breakup of common Takic into the Luiseño-Juaneño on one hand, and the Kizh-Serrano on the other, at about 2,000 years ago. (This is comparable to the differentiation of the Romance languages of Europe). The division of the Kizh-Serrano group into the separate Kizh and Serrano peoples is more recent, and may have been influenced by Spanish missionary activity.
Mission period
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 Kizh (later referred to as "Gabrieleños") in a canoe. The following day, Cabrillo and his men, the first Europeans known to have interacted with the Gabrieleño people, entered a large bay on the mainland, which they named "Baya de los Fumos" on account of the many smoke fires they saw there. This is commonly believed to be San Pedro Bay, near present-day San Pedro.
Spanish Franciscan priests founded two missions in what is now Los Angeles County; the Gabrieleños lived in the area around Mission San Gabriel, founded in 1771, and the Fernandeños lived near Mission San Fernando, founded in 1797. Both groups have been designated as Gabrieleño. Although their language idioms were distinguishable, they did not diverge greatly, and it is possible there were as many as half a dozen dialects rather than the two which the existence of the missions has lent the appearance of being standard.
The demarcation of the Fernandeño and the Gabrieleño territories is mostly conjectural, and there is no known point in which the two groups differed markedly in customs. The wider Gabrieleño group occupied what is now Los Angeles County south of the Sierra Madre and half of Orange County, as well as the islands of Santa Catalina and San Clemente. At the Gabrieleño settlement of Yangna (Yaangna) along the Los Angeles River, missionaries and Indian neophytes, or baptized converts, built the first town of Los Angeles in 1781. It was called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola). In 1784, a sister mission, the Nuestra Señora Reina de los Angeles Asistencia, was founded at Yaanga as well.
Culture
The Gabrieleño occupied the main part of the most fertile lowland of southern California, including a stretch of sheltered coast with a pleasant climate and abundant food resources, and the most habitable of the Santa Barbara Islands. They were perhaps the most culturally advanced group south of the Tehachapi, and the wealthiest of the Uto-Aztecan speakers in California, dominating other native groups culturally wherever contacts occurred. Many of the cultural developments of the surrounding southern peoples had their origin with the Gabrieleño.
Cultural Resources
The Gabrieleño people had a concentrated population along the 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. To build them, they used planks of driftwood pine that were sewn together with vegetable fiber cord, edge to edge, and then glued with the tar that was available either from the La Brea Tar Pits, or as asphalt that had washed up on shore from offshore oil seeps. The finished vessel was caulked with plant fibers and tar, stained with red ochre, and sealed with pine pitch. The te'aat, as noted by the Sebastián Vizcaíno expedition, could hold up to 20 people as well as their gear and trade goods.
These canoes allowed the development of trade between the mainland villages and the offshore islands, and were important to the region's economy and social organization, with trade in food and manufactured goods being carried on between the people on the mainland coast and people in the interior as well. The Gabrieleño regularly paddled their canoes to Catalina Island, where they gathered abalone, which they pried off the rocks with implements made of fragments of whale ribs or other strong bones.
The Gabrieleño proper called themselves kumi.vit. Their villages were located in places with accessible drinking water, protection from the elements, and productive areas where different ecological niches on the land intersected. Situating their villages at these resource islands enabled the Gabrieleño to gather the plant products of two or more zones in close proximity.
The Gabrieleño did not practice horticulture or agriculture, as their well-developed hunter-gatherer and trade economy provided adequate food resources. 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. The front apron was made of cords of twisted dog bane or milkweed. People went barefoot except in rough areas where they wore crude sandals made of yucca fiber. In cold weather, they wore robes or capes made from twisted strips of rabbit fur, deer skins, or bird skins with the feathers still attached. Also used as blankets at night, these were made of sea otter skins along the coast and on the islands.
Households consisted of a main house (kiiy) and temporary camp shelters used during food gathering excursions. In the summer, families who lived near grasslands collected roots, seeds, flowers, fruit, and leafy greens, and in the winter families who lived near chaparral shrubland collected nuts and acorns, yucca, and hunted deer. Some prairie communities moved to the coast in the winter to fish, hunt whales and elephant seals, and harvest shellfish. 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.
Men performed most of the heavy, short-duration labor; they hunted, fished, helped with some food-gathering, and carried on trade with other cultural groups. Large game animals were hunted with bow and arrows, and small game was taken with deadfall traps, snares, and bows made of buckeye wood. John P. Harrington recorded that the Gabrieleño used rattlesnake venom as an arrow poison. Burrowing animals were driven from their burrows with smoke and clubbed; communal rabbit drives were made during the seasonal controlled burning of chaparral on the prairie, the rabbits being killed with nets, bow and arrows, and throwing sticks.
The Gabrieleño used harpoons, spear-throwers, and clubs to hunt marine mammals. Fishing was done from shorelines or along rivers, streams, and creeks with hook and line, nets, basketry traps, spears, bow and arrows, and poisons made from plants. The women collected and prepared plant and some animal food resources and made baskets, pots, and clothing. In their old age, they and the old men cared for the young and taught them Gabrieleño lifeways.
Gabrieleño material culture and technology reflected a sophisticated knowledge of the working properties of natural materials and a highly developed artisanship, shown in many articles of everyday utility decorated with shell inlay, carving, and painting. Most of these items, including baskets, shell tools, and wooden weapons, were extremely perishable. Soapstone from quarries on Catalina Island was used to make cooking implements, animal carvings, pipes, ritual objects, and ornaments.
Using the stems of rushes (Juncus sp .), 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. They sealed some baskets, such as water bottles, with asphalt to make watertight containers for holding liquids.
The Gabrieleño used the leaves of tule reeds as well as those of cattails to weave mats and thatch their shelters. Bread was made from the yellow pollen of cattail heads, and the underground rhizomes were dried and ground into a starchy meal. The young shoots were eaten raw. The seeds of chia, a herbaceous plant of the sage family, were gathered in large quantities when they were ripe. The flower heads were beaten with a paddle over a tightly woven basket to collect the seeds. These were dried or roasted and ground into a flour called "pinole," which was often mixed with the flour of other ground seeds or grains. Water was added to make a cooling drink; mixing with less water yielded a kind of porridge that could be baked into cakes.
Acorn mush was a staple food of the Gabrieleños, as it was of all the Mission indigenous. Acorns were gathered in October; this was a communal effort with the men climbing the trees and shaking them while the women and children collected the nuts. The acorns were stored in large wicker granaries supported by wooden stakes well above the ground. Preparing them for food took about a week. Acorns were placed, one at a time, on end in the slight hollow of a rock and their shells broken by a light blow from a small hammerstone; then the membrane, or skin, covering the acorn meat was removed. Following this process the acorn meats were dried for days, after which the kernels were pounded into meal with a pestle. This was done in a stone mortar or in a mortar hole in a boulder. Large bedrock outcroppings near oak stands often display evidence of the community mills where the women labored.
The pounded acorn meal was put into baskets and the bitter tannic acid it contained was leached out to make the meal more palatable and digestible. The prepared meal was cooked by boiling in water in a watertight grass-woven basket or in a soapstone bowl into which heated stones were dropped. Soapstone casseroles were used directly over the fire. Various foods of meat, seeds, or roots were cooked by the same method. The mush thus prepared was eaten cold or nearly so, as was all their food. Another favored Gabrieleño food was the seed kernel of a species of plum (prunus ilicifolia) they called islay, which was ground into meal and made into gruel.
Reciprocity and sharing of resources were important values in Gabrieleño culture. Hugo Reid reported that the hoarding of food supplies was so stigmatized by the Gabrieleño moral code that hunters would give away large portions of coveted foods such as fresh meat, and that under some circumstances, hunters were prohibited from eating their own kill or fishermen from eating their own catch.
In the Gabrieleño economic system, food resources were managed by the village chief, who was given a portion of the yield of each day's hunting, fishing, or gathering to add to the communal food reserves. Individual families stored some food to be used in times of scarcity. The Gabrieleño territory was the center of a flourishing trade network that extended from the Channel Islands as far east as the Colorado River, allowing the Gabrieleño to maintain trade relations with the Cahuilla, Serrano, Luisenio, Chumash, and Mojave cultural groups. The information for this section was retrieved from this website.
Villages in SGV
The land of the Kizh covers far more than SGV. Therefore, there are many Kizh villages that spanned the area of their coverage. The Kizh were enslaved to build the San Gabriel Mission in the City of San Gabriel and the San Fernando Mission in the City of Los Angeles. Other Gabrielino village sites were discovered at Cal State Long Beach, the Sheldon Reservoir in Pasadena and in Los Encinos State Historical Park in Encino. Archaeology delineating the historical lands of the Kizh was substantially complete by 1930, when over 100 sites had been excavated. The number of archaeological sites has grown to 2,800 locations. The new locations largely confirm the work done by 1930, long before Indian gaming made such information economically important. The Kizh occupied villages to the north up to Topanga Canyon in Malibu (where they ran into the Chumash, sometimes violently). Kizh villages extended south to Laguna Beach (though the Juanenos claim the Kizh never settled beyond the estuary at Newport Beach). Kizh village sites extend inland to the San Bernardino Mountains. There the younger, independent Cahuilla culture was derived from roots in the religion, language and trading culture of the Kizh (Morongo and Agua Caliente bands are Cahuilla). The source of this information is the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe website. The villages below are the villages that covered that area of land that constitutes present-day SGV.
These are the tribes that once inhabited Los Angeles County. San Gabriel Valley covering the left side of the map. Retrieved from this website.
This map represents the present-day version of the same area located above. This map was retrieved from this website.
This is an image of present-day San Gabriel Valley that represents the cities where the SGV villages would have been located. This map was retrieved from this website. For more information on which village each city is located in, click here.