Our Story

We are the original people of this homeland — the villages, rivers, springs, mountains, islands, and burial places of the Los Angeles Basin and surrounding region. Long before this land carried Spanish, Mexican, or American names, our people had our own villages, our own leaders, our own families, our own laws, and our own way of life. We knew this land by relationship, not ownership. The rivers fed us. The willow gave us our homes. The springs carried life. The mountains, islands, and village places carried the memory of our ancestors.

Our people were known by our ancestral name, Kizh — Quiichi — the people of the willow houses. Later, under the Mission San Gabriel system, outsiders called us Gabrieleno because our families were recorded through Mission San Gabriel Arcángel. That name became tied to our mission records, baptisms, marriages, burials, and the written proof of our continued existence. But before that mission name, before colonization, before the maps were changed, we were already here.

Our villages were not empty places. Yangna, Shevaangna, Toviscanga, Lukupanga, and many others were living communities. These were places of family, ceremony, trade, teaching, burial, and responsibility. Our ancestors walked these lands, cared for these waters, gathered from these plants, and buried their loved ones in the same homeland we continue to protect today.

Then came the mission system.

Our people were pulled into Mission San Gabriel. Many were baptized, renamed, forced into labor, punished for practicing their ways, and separated from their villages. Disease killed many. Families were broken apart. Some fled. Some resisted. Some survived by entering the mission records while still carrying who they were inside their families. Our ancestors endured the Spanish mission period, the Mexican rancho period, and the American period, each one bringing another form of loss, labor, erasure, and survival.

But we did not vanish.

We survived through our families. We survived through intermarriage. We survived through our grandparents, great-grandparents, and elders who carried our bloodlines, stories, responsibilities, and memories forward even when the outside world tried to say we were gone. Some of our families became part of the old Spanish-Mexican California families. Some worked on ranchos. Some lived quietly in San Gabriel, Los Angeles, La Puente, Los Nietos, Santa Fe Springs, Whittier Narrows, and throughout our old village lands. But being forced to survive inside another society did not erase who we were.

That is the part people often misunderstand. Intermarriage was not disappearance. It was survival. Spanish names, Mexican records, Catholic baptisms, and American census labels did not remove the Indigenous blood, memory, or responsibility of our people. Our ancestors adapted because they had to. They carried our identity in family lines, oral history, village memory, and the continued duty to protect our ancestors.

Today, the Gabrieleno Kizh people are still here in our homeland. We are not returning from somewhere else. We never left. We are the descendants of the people recorded in the mission books, remembered in the old villages, buried in this soil, and carried through generations of families who refused to let the truth die.

Our survival is not just in documents. It is in the way we stand for our ancestors today. It is in every burial we protect. It is in every village site we defend. It is in every spring, river, hill, and cultural place we continue to speak for. It is in the work we do when development threatens the resting places of our people. It is in the responsibility we carry as lineal descendants of this land.

The world may have tried to rename us, erase us, divide us, and speak over us. But our ancestors left us more than records. They left us a duty.

We are still here.

We are the Kizh Nation — the Gabrieleno Band of Mission Indians — the lineal descendants of the original Indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin and surrounding homeland. Our history is not only pain. It is strength. It is memory. It is survival. It is the truth of a people who endured missionization, disease, forced labor, rancho servitude, American erasure, and generations of being told we no longer existed.

Yet here we remain, standing on the same land, speaking for the same ancestors, protecting the same sacred places, and carrying forward the same responsibility.

We are not a people of the past.

We are the living continuation of our ancestors.