STILL HERE - “Ehkwashim!”

Text Pamela Nagler
Photography Julian Lucas
Published Dec 6, 2021 9:52am PST

The Original People of the Los Angeles Basin & the Channel Islands (4,000 square miles). The Los Angeles Basin has always been well-populated. Sometimes we fall into a habit of thinking that the Native people who lived here, before the Spanish, Mexicans, U.S. citizens came, were few, primitive, isolated and without technology, but nothing is farther from the truth.  

The Los Angeles Basin was heavily populated then, just as it was now - and the people who lived here were well-connected to each other through trade and culture that extended westward to the islands (they were navigators who negotiated the sea in plank canoes) and westward to the American Southwest and up into the northern regions and south to Mexico and Baja California.

There was an extensive network of trails - just as there’s an incredible network of highways and roads and freeways today. There is also a widely circulated belief that the people of the Los Angeles basin are extinct, but this is simply not true - they are still here, living and working amongst us - some 4,000.

The indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin lived in a patchwork or mosaic of ecosystems - a few miles to the South, it was desert; to the east it was mountains; to the west, it was ocean. Ten miles one way or another, people spoke slightly differently, harvested somewhat differently, hunted in different places, celebrated somewhat differently - according to their environment and customs. This is not so different from the towns and cities that dot Southern California’s landscape today.

Living in 100 or so villages or rancherias of 100 people or so, the original people had no name in common for the 5,000 who lived here, but they had names for other people who lived elsewhere - mountain people, desert people, coastal people - but those who inhabited these rich river valleys fed by rivers and springs from the mountains, self-identified by their village or rancheria rather than their linguistic group.

Make no mistake - this area was not a desert until we made it one. The story of the original ones who lived here is the story of rivers where the foliage was so dense, a squirrel could hop from tree to tree from Los Angeles to Long Beach and never touch ground. Families would wake in the morning and bathe in the river, warming themselves by the fire as they combed their hair and prepared for the day.

In the case of those who lived in Pomona, they called themselves Toybipet, the inhabitants of Toybingna - located nearby were the rancherias of Cucamonga and Asuksangna (Azusa).  On the Pomona High School campus, there is a graveyard for 118 bodies buried at what’s called the Palomares Cemetery. In 1837, Californio Ygnacio Palomares received a Mexican land grant for Mission San Gabriel’s Rancho San Jose - a vast cattle ranch. Palomares Adobe, located nearby, was located right next to a Native rancheria because that’s what the Spanish/Mexican colonists did, locate their rancho near a Native rancheria so they could take advantage of Native labor. When Ygnacio Palomares arrived, he reportedly said that the valley was filled with Natives.

Courtesy of Julian Lucas 2021

Since 2006, four organizations have claimed to represent the people of the Los Angeles basin: the Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe, the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe, the Kizh Nation (Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians); and the Gabrieleño/Tongva Tribal Council. Tongva comes from an Gabrielino informant at the turn of the last century. Kizh means ‘people of the willow houses.’ Gabrielino refers to the fact that they were descendants of those who lived at the Mission at San Gabriel. 

In recent years, the state of California has broadened its History-Social Studies framework to include more information about Native Californians - how they lived before colonization, how they were affected by the arrival of settlers, and how it is important that California public schools teach that missions were “sites of conflict, conquest and forced labor.”

The people of the Los Angeles Basin never ceded their land to Spain, to Mexico, to the U.S. We live and work and play on their ancestral lands.

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Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

“For Purposes of Labor and Lust” Human Trafficking & Enslavement in California, 1850 - 1875

Excerpt by Pamela Nagler
Published 11/17/2021 6:00am

Even though California entered the Union as a ‘free soil state’ rather than as a ‘slave state,’ California’s state legislators immediately set to work to install Native American slavery in such a way as to not arouse dissension from the abolitionists back East. Simply stated, Native American slavery in the U.S. was simply not viewed in the same way as Transatlantic African slavery.

Under California’s vagrancy and indentureship laws, the Anglo-Americans kidnapped, bought, sold and received ‘proprietorship’ over men, women and children. Children were the easiest target - more malleable, and less likely to run away. After a massacre (and there were plenty in those days), ruthless white men would scoop up the orphans for sale, trade or personal use. Women were sought after as well - as one observer stated, “for reasons of labor and lust.” Often, the men were simply slaughtered.(However, that said, there is plenty of evidence of captive men laboring on ranches for no pay.)  

For sure, Los Angeles had its auction block, where Native labors were bought and sold 52 weeks a year, but the slavery enacted under California’s so-called ‘apprenticeship’ or ‘indentureship’ laws was closer to what we would today call human trafficking rather than the chattel slavery of the South - not exactly slavery de jure, but certainly slavery de facto. 

Though California’s slave trade is little known and rarely discussed, it was was enormous, and its effects can only be roughly estimated. Contemporary historian Andrés Reséndez in his ground-breaking book, The Other Slavery, wrote that according to one estimate: “this act may have affected as many as twenty thousand California Indians, including four thousand children kidnapped from their parents and employed primarily as domestic servants and farm laborers.”  

However, not all children were ‘kidnapped’ - ruthless men often slaughtered their parents, their families, their people and took them captive.

Much went unreported - slavery belongs in a shadow world of its own - however, there are plenty of newspaper and court reports, Native testimony and official documents submitted by Indian agents to substantiate the magnitude of it: 

“Ready Gain”

Northern California Colusa County pioneer Henry Clay Bailey wrote in 1897 about what happened in his region in the early years just after U.S. takeover. He explained that the ‘kidnappings’ often began with slaughtering the men, and sometimes the women in a Native encampment:

“Not many of the present generation of Californians know that in the early ’50’s a regular slave trade was carried on in the mountains bordering the upper Sacramento Valley, from Clear Lake to Stony Creek. 
Vicious and desperate characters, for the ready gain to be obtained by the trade, would locate a small band of Indians, make a sudden dash upon the camp, revolvers in hand, shoot as many of the men as possible, and sometimes the women, too, and scatter the rest of the band. The raiders would then catch all the boys and girls between eight and fourteen years of age who had remained near the camp. 

Then they would start out for a market, perhaps to fill orders they had already obtained. These men would stop at nothing in their greed for gain, and in their eyes their captives were legitimate merchandise.” 

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”A Charitable Act”

Ranchers and cattlemen hired men to kill the adults in a Native rancheria or village, before dispersing the children among themselves, which they declared an ‘act of charity.’ Sacramento Times, March 5, 1853, Exciting News from Tehama – Indian Thefts - Terrible Vengeance of the Whites:

 “In Colusa County, local stockmen Thomas and Toombs hired men for $100 a month to ‘hunt down and [k]ill the Diggers, like other beasts of prey…Captain Rose took one child. Mr. Lattimer another, and the others were disposed of in the same charitable manner among the party.’”

Note that the editors likened the Native to “beasts of prey” and used the derogatory racial epithet, “digger.” By dehumanizing California’s indigenous people, it made it that much easier to justify their slaughter and enslavement.

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“Stealing and Selling young Indian boys and girls”

Often, these men who killed the adults, killed them in order to obtain their children for sale. The Daily Alta, San Francisco, 1855:

“One of the most infamous practices known to modern times has been carried on for several months past against the aborigines of California. It has been the custom of certain disreputable persons to steal away young Indian boys and girls, and carry them off and sell them to white folks for whatever they could get. 

In order to do this, they are obliged in many cases to kill the parents, for low as they are on the scale of humanity, they [the Indians] have that instinctive love of their offspring which prompts them to defend them at the sacrifice of their lives.”

___________ 

”Abduction Attempt”

Kidnappings often occurred as a result of warfare, but this article revealed that  the attempted abduction of a Native woman or child could happen at any time. Sacramento Daily Union, 1857:

“some white men near Yreka attempted to carry off the squaw of one of the Indians in the vicinity. Her husband interfered, and was knocked down and beaten by the abductors.” 

Note the pejorative use of the epithet, “squaw.”

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“Bright Little Specimens”

This newspaper article reads like an advertisement for native children. Sacramento Daily Union, 1857:

“The Pitt River volunteers have returned to Yreka. carrying with them a number of native children who were given to different families in that place. The Union says some were bright little specimens and no doubt will be of much benefit to those who raise and care for them.”

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“To the Highest Bidder”

This article spoke admiringly of the system that delivered ‘delinquent’ Indians to the highest bidder. Marysville Weekly Express, 1859:

“They have a singular way of dispensing justice to Indians in Fresno County. An Indian sentenced for any delinquency, to be imprisoned for a certain time, to labor, to the highest bidder. The system, naively remarks a paper in Mariposa, works admirably, though we do not know, of its being practiced in any other county.”

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“Indians [were] being hunted for their children”

News of this shameless trade in children reached the East Coast, and was brought to the Senate floor in 1860. The Senate officially condemned California for allowing this practice. However, distracted by the looming secession of the Southern states over African-American slavery, the US Senate took no direct action.

The Boston Transcript in 1860 printed a scathing expose on the child slave trade written by one of their newspaper correspondents. The author noted that in order to capture these children, who sold for between $50 to $100, the slavers had to ‘‘make war on the Indians.’’ He reported that he ‘‘stopped at one house on the trail in the deep gorges of the mountains, and saw six poor naked urchins who had been recently captured.’’ 

Further, he reported that the man who held these children was a ‘‘brutal rascal [who] pointed to one boy and said, with the greatest coolness imaginable, that he ‘had killed his daddy yesterday, and thought he was not quite big enough to kill, so he brought him in,’ and showed us a huge knife with which he had slaughtered the unresisting native.’’ 

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“Loathe to Part with their Offspring”

In an article in the March 1, 1860 Humboldt Times, the author lamented that there were not more indigenous children to work in the homes of the settlers, "but the Indians have been hitherto loath to part with their offspring at such ages as would make them most susceptible of training.”

As if it were a stretch of the imagination that parents would not want to part with their children.

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Sexual Captivity

An editorial in the Sacramento Union, 1860, decried the sex slave trade:
“The most disgusting phase of this species of slavery is the concubinage of creatures calling themselves white men with squaws throughout various portions of the State. The details of this portion of the ‘apprenticeship’ system are unfit to commit to paper.” 

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“For Purposes of Labor and Lust”

This editorial made it explicit that Indians were not just traded as servants, but also for sex. Marysville Appeal, 1861:

“it is from these mountain tribes that white settlers draw their supplies of kidnapped children, educated as servants, and women for purposes of labor and lust…

there are parties in the northern portion of the state whose sole occupation has been to steal young children and squaws from the poor Diggers who inhabit the mountains, and dispose of them at handsome prices to the settlers who, being in the majority of cases unmarried but at housekeeping, willingly pay $50 or $60 for a young Digger to cook or wait upon them, or $100 for a likely young girl.” 

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For the Children’s “Protection”

George H. Woodman was arrested for kidnapping thirteen (or sixteen, by some reports) young Indians, with the intent to sell them. However, he was both discharged and exonerated because he made the case that if he didn’t ‘employ’ them - others would, and that he ‘protected’ the children from unscrupulous dealers. The Sacramento Union and Mendocino Herald, 1863 stated that Woodman claimed that living next to an Indian rancheria, he often “employed several of the natives and protected their children and has thus interfered with the speculating purposes of other parties.” 

“When they find a rancheria well stocked with young Indians, [they] murder in cold blood all the old ones” 

In 1862, the Alta California republished an article from the Ukiah Herald:

“Here is well known there are a number of men in this county, who have for years made it their profession to capture and sell Indians, the price ranging from $30 to $150, according to quality. Some hard stories are told of those engaged in the trade, in regard to the manner of the capture of the children. It is even asserted that there are men engaged in it who do not hesitate, when they find a rancheria well stocked with young Indians, to murder in cold blood all the old ones, in order that they may safely possess themselves of all the offspring.” 

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Runaway Captives

Captive slaves escaped, or attempted to escape. After disclosing that one young captive who had been held against her will by a US military officer and his family had managed to escape, the article explained that the captives were not always the perfect slaves that the white settlers had hoped for. Humboldt Times and Maysville Appeal 1861:

“Several instances have occurred lately of Indian apprentices absconding from the parties to whom they have been indentured. One young Squaw that been in service for some months in the family of Capt. Tomlinson, ran away a few days ago, taking wearing apparel, some forty dollars in money and and other valuables which she had stolen from other members of the family. Experience teaches that the natives do not, as a general rule, become reliable servants. Each individual who has one, will of course insist theirs is trustworthy, until the contrary is proven.” 

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Reward Offered for  Runaway Slaves

When children ran away, their captors would sometimes run a public notice in the newspaper, offering a reward. Marsyville Daily Appeal, 1861:

$50
REWARD

LOST

TWO INDIAN GIRLS, ONE ABOUT

Ten, the other fourteen years old.  The oldest

Is tattooed on her cheeks and chin.  Both had on dark

Calico dresses, and the hair of each was cut close.  

Any Information that will lead to their recovery will be

Liberally rewarded: and any person returning them to

Me shall receive the reward above named.

J.H. WRIGT

Plaza, Marysville 

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Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

Rape & the Conquest

Photography Julian Lucas 2014

Text Pamela Nagler
Photography Julian Lucas

“In the United States, violence against indigenous women has reached unprecedented levels on tribal lands and in Alaska Native villages. More than 4 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence, and more than 1 in 2 have experienced sexual violence. Alaska Native women continue to suffer the highest rate of forcible sexual assault and have reported rates of domestic violence up to 10 times higher than in the rest of the United States. Though available data is limited, the number of missing and murdered American Indian and Alaska Native women and the lack of a diligent and adequate federal response is extremely alarming to indigenous women, tribal governments, and communities. On some reservations, indigenous women are murdered at more than ten times the national average.”

• Indian Law Resource Center
  
  

The Conquests did not introduce rape to the regions, but they did introduce rape on a scale not seen before. The Spanish Conquest of California, as it was elsewhere in the Americas, was a masculine conquest and sexual assault having very much to do with it. Rape, sexual assault, was systemic to the Conquest.

The European invaders in the Americas believed that not just the lands, but the people, were there for the taking. It was not just about taking possession of the land, but about taking possession of indigenous bodies as well. Explorers, conquistadors, soldiers, sailors and Padres alike believed that the Americas and the Amerindians simply waited in ‘darkness’ and ‘ignorance’ for them to claim possession. In order to do so, the conquistador arrived with shiploads of weapons and strategies to gain the supremacy that they thought they deserved. Rape - sexual assault - was just one of these strategies.

Rarely did the conquistadors bring their own women. Women were there to be ‘acquired’ along the way, and this kind of thinking permeated everything the conquerors did. They routinely evaluated the lands they encountered as barren or fertile, placing value on the territories as to their usefulness for themselves. They routinely enslaved the peoples they encountered to serve their needs, and they subjugated women by sexually assaulting them.

In the early days in Alta California, it was customary for the explorers and invaders to describe the inhabitants as “quiet” and “tractable” - a projection of what they hoped for. When things did not go well, they instead described them as ‘hostile savages’ (though sometimes, they called them this even when things were going well). Integral to their evaluation of indigenous peoples was whether or not they could be subjugated, and how easily. 

On their explorations, sea captains and land explorers routinely kidnapped or “took” natives to serve as servants or translators - and they also routinely raped the women. Later, when the soldiers arrived to invade, occupy and colonize the Californias, they not only conscripted anyone they could to labor for them, but they raped the women or “took” them as concubines. It was part of the formula. Contemporary historian Virginia M. Bouvier describes that, in California, the indigenous people faced an “explosive sexuality” from their Spanish invaders. 

It is common to think of rape as a single horrible, ‘intimate’ action between an aggressor and his single victim, but rape in California had a scale of its own. It was multiplied hundreds of times by the soldiery. It was not just a single terrible act of aggression against one woman, but the symbolic castration of the men connected with the women. The physical ramifications of the assaults went beyond a single violent act. The rapes restricted mobility and the inhabitants of a rancheria’s ability to procure food. These assaults set up a cycle of fear and hatred, with retaliations resulting in casualties. The indigenous men who struggled to defend the women often wound up dead. In the end, rape became an act against the entire community, leading to the subjugation of everyone. 

Rape was both physical violence and psychological warfare, and it enabled the conquerors to gain territory and loyal subjects for the Crown.

In Las Californias, in both Baja and Alta California, these predatory soldiers were responsible for the spread of syphilis, ‘mal galico,’ throughout the indigenous communities. Disease became just one more way that the revolution was won against them. Syphilis, if it did not kill outright, weakened them, made the people more susceptible to other diseases, living as they were in the unsanitary conditions they endured in the missions, enduring the maltreatment of the Spaniards which included the systematic use of torture and incarceration.

Spanish soldiers, trained for war, trained to kill Indians, trained in the belief of their racial and cultural superiority, raped. They considered both sexual violence and exploitation as the ‘spoils of war’ - something deserved as a consequence for their service as soldiers. At times, they raped because they were bored. They raped for sport. They raped because they could. Their duties as soldiers did not occupy all of their time. Rape became a crime of opportunity. The conquering males, isolated, without their wives, mothers, sisters, cousins, took advantage of their circumstances. Sexual conquest was part of the language of the Conquest and It was fed by a literature and philosophy that promoted race and gender supremacy while romanticizing the vanquishing and the ‘taking.’ The conquistadors - the military and the missionaries - took advantage of the fact that In the Spanish patriarchal casta system in the Americas, indigenous women ranked on the lowest rung on the race, gender, socio-economic ladder.

And while the Spanish Crown, the Spanish government did not officially sanction rape, the officials expected it, anticipated it, and whatever they said about it, they lacked the will or the means to stop it. Tacitly, they recognized that it furthered their goals of  reduccion - of dislocating people from their ancestral lands and placing them in mission compounds modeled on Spanish townships as a means to turning them into loyal, tax-paying citizens for the Crown.

The Franciscan Fathers in California certainly railed against the multitude of sexual abuses. They considered each rape an act against God, but there was also some self-interest in their protestations. They recognized that the rapes were detrimental to their effort to convert California. In the end, however, no matter how much they railed against it, the Fathers had little effect in either stopping or curtailing the widespread, systemic abuse, and they remained complicit because they relied on the military to sustain the mission institutions that they valued so much.

The California military governors only half-heartedly placed any sanctions whatsoever on their own troops. Punishments were few and arbitrary, haphazard, and, in the end, ineffective in curbing the violence. It was a soldiers’ job was to terrorize and control, and the military and government officials simply recognized the efficacy of sexual violence - rape carved out space for them to take possession of the territories and coerce the people into Spanish compliance.

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Pamela Casey Nagler, Pomona-born, is an independent scholar, currently conducting research on California’s indigenous people, focusing on the Spanish, Russian, Mexican and US invasions between 1769 and the 1860s. The point of studying this history is to tell us how we got here from there. 

LINKS

• “Ending Violence Against Native Women”

• https://indianlaw.org/issue/ending-violence-against-native-women?fbclid=IwAR2WQR7Gbic6tp6I5nnoi2YyUTLs6wFfzFWcVpO_Wx5RlldFquZ4r_KyYLc

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Alien

Photography Jacquie Ray From the Series, “We Shed” | Courtesy of Bree Leche

Text Bree Leche

During my first pregnancy, I found how people's views of me changed as my body had changed. I learned that there were many unspoken rules to what pregnant people could and could not do. Even though pregnancy is just a natural process (literally, how any single human comes into the world), there seemed to be a strange preoccupation with it and/or desire to control it.

I was often put into a box and infantilized for my decisions. People were appalled at how I rejected their ideas of who a person transitioning to motherhood should be. Even strangers had an opinion about my body, and how I should be moving in it. I was questioned for hiking in my pregnant body, for working, for enjoying a beer at a bar, for engaging in kink, and for showing my bare belly during the summertime.

I've always wanted to do it on my own terms, coming up with my own concepts for new roles I've taken on. As a wife in an open marriage, as well as a sex and relationship coach who guides people how to properly listen to their inner voices. Creating and collaborating artistically through my pregnancy feels like another chance to instill that feeling.

The images presented are a part of a larger art project, which includes images of myself during pregnancy and postpartum that expanded folks’ imagination on who and what “mother” can and can’t be. This set was created in collaboration with photographer and contemporary erotic filmmaker Jacquie Ray. The body of work is all shot on film, and are simultaneously, maternal, erotic, strong, vulnerable, familiar and alien.

I hope that they challenge and expand what pregnancy represents, and make us ask ourselves why we have a difficult time allowing mothers and mamas-to-be as multifaceted and magical as they are.

DRAG Loss

Image Courtesy of Amy Zapata

Short Story & Photography By Amy Zapata
San Bernardino, CA

In the four years, I have taken photos of the DTLA drag scene. An assorted collection of images and video footage of artists and places, an archive from places that are now closed, from performers that have moved or retired. Remembering nights at bars, watching Ursula Major perform as I staple dollar bills to her arm, watching the blood trickle down. I have seen burlesque dancers capture the attention of audiences. Witnessing short-lived nights and performers creating spaces for other artists, trying to house a place for their fellow Queer performers. Sissy Spastik, who no longer performs, added her Chicago flair to the DTLA scene. Sissy’s look and makeup still some of the best I have ever seen. Memories are created in those moments, when the moments end the photos are what is left.

A part of being an artist is showing up. Being a photographer is bearing witness, documenting what is there, what others are missing, what will never be again. Even in the still, change is the constant. Having spent most of my time this year at home, the times I have driven through Los Angeles, I start to see all the changes that I have missed. Like so many of us, drag performers have adapted. The movement towards digital video performances has given way to a different way to connect, to perform. My brother, the drag artist Jean Decay and other DTLA drag artists made the shift to digital drag nights, and instead of the still images, I once took it now helping film videos 6 ft apart. My participation is tied to the creation of the performances. Showing up means collaborating on ideas, pushing what can be achieved in this new landscape. When this is over, it will be a digital collection of works from that year when we all stopped.

Image Courtesy of Amy Zapata

Losing the ability to show up, we are perpetually missing out. There are moments happening, unable to be captured that will always be lost. There is something to be said about loss, it makes bearing witness that much more important.