Tongva Park

This guide to Tongva Park in Santa Monica opens with a 2013 city council meeting to name a new park built over an old parking lot, and the write-in campaign that pushed through the name Tongva, for the Indigenous people of the Los Angeles basin, over planners' preferred choice. It follows the objection that came next, from archaeologist Gary Stickel and the Gabrieleno Band of Mission Indians, who argued the word was never a people's name at all, and traces it back to a Gabrieleno woman's own account from 1905. Listen while standing on lawns shaped like California arroyos, built to evoke the landscape the debate is about.