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by Peter Nabokov
LA
Times
07 June 2004
Over the last few
months, one of the largest American Indian burial grounds ever found in
California —or the nation—has been rising out of the earth in West Los
Angeles, more than 275 bodies at last count. You can see the site from Lincoln
Boulevard — those big green tents on land that developers mean to turn into an
Edenic stream, open space for the 13,000 people who will populate the
master-planned Playa Vista community.
Each day more resting
places of Los Angeles' original inhabitants, those we know as the
Gabrielino-Tongva, are being exposed and their bones brushed clean. Rib cages
and skulls, basketry remnants and personal goods are sifted from the dirt. Some
of the remains are 4,000 years old; some date from the days of the Spanish
missions. Each is laid in a cardboard banker's box — stacks of them fill metal
shipping containers — to be reinterred someplace else.
It is all being done as
competently, rapidly, legally and as quietly as possible. By the time most of us
get around to realizing what has happened, Los Angeles will have lost its last,
best chance to suitably memorialize these people, and to redress, in even a
small way, a criminal chapter in our history — the eviction and decimation of
California's native peoples.
None of this is
underhanded.
The brigade of
reputable archeologists hired by Playa Vista is apparently doing a professional
job, energized by an unparalleled opportunity to learn about the past.
The Indian monitors on
the site — mournfully walking from grave to grave, making sure that no bones
are photographed and that each bead and arrowhead is handled properly — are
exercising to the letter of the law a host of Indian grave-protection statutes
passed since the 1980s. The multiple Indian groups still in contention over the
site have every democratic right to debate how to handle the situation —
whether to protest the grave removals or make pacts with the powerful Playa
Vista lawyers.
Even environmentalists,
who have resisted development at Playa Vista and the associated West Bluffs for
nearly two decades, are understandably grateful for a little more wetland, and
grow silent when it comes to fighting on behalf of the Indians' cultural claims.
And the Playa Vista
developers? They too are acting on the letter of the law, protected by the
powerlessness of the Gabrielinos, who like so many native California peoples
never won federal recognition as a tribe. They are free to boast about the
picture-perfect "riparian corridor" they will create out of a
neglected ditch, to explain how disinterring and reinterring bones adds up to
respect for Indian tradition.
It's all so
"correct." Yet it's all so wrong.
Other graveyards get
automatic respect. Who would touch Westwood's national cemetery? A graveyard in
Ventura is piously characterized as a "pioneer" cemetery and left as a
park where visitors can meditate on those who came before. Whenever African
American slave graveyards turn up, they are likewise accorded sacred handling
and pride of place. And in Victoria, British Columbia, politically adept
Chinatown associations combined with civic pride to save a Chinese cemetery on a
prime piece of waterfront.
Shouldn't that happen
here? Shouldn't the discovery of a sacred zone of such magnitude as this burial
ground have caused everyone to halt work and take stock — and then to find
imaginative ways to redeem the past? Shouldn't a Gabrielino park or museum
memorialize this place, anchored by the solemn right of these dead to remain
there, with their possessions, forever?
Not at Playa Vista. In
years past, Hughes Aircraft and other landowners bulldozed away other graves
here. And just this year, on nearby West Bluffs, a village site was destroyed to
clear the way for a 114-home luxury neighborhood. Now this last remaining bit of
what we know as Saa'angva, the Gabrielino communities of Ballona Creek, is
getting its cosmetic surgery.
After we complete the
eviction of the Indian bodies, spirits and histories at Playa Vista and make
what's left into a picture-perfect creek, we will gradually forget who first
humanized this landscape and settled our city.
Everyone is just doing
his or her job. Everything about this is wrong.
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