Skeletons in Playa Vista's Closet

Since last fall, archeologists employed by Playa Vista, the huge luxury housing development near Marina del Rey, have excavated more than 300 skeletons of Gabrielino-Tongva Indians, the indigenous people of Los Angeles, from the southwest corner of the Ballona Wetlands. Burial artifacts, mostly beads and other jewelry, were found with the bones. In addition, remnants of a village -- tools, arrowheads and eating utensils -- have been unearthed.

The site is among the largest known Tongva cemeteries, and it's a breathtaking discovery, a window to the origins of our city. But Playa Vista developers want the skeletons removed because they are in the path of a proposed drainage corridor for thousands of planned homes and condominiums. According to the plan, the bones would be reburied elsewhere on the property, a center on Native American culture built to guide tourists, and the artifacts sent to UCLA.

For a metropolis that touts its multicultural and diversity credentials, this approach to the culture of the area's first inhabitants is cavalier and indecent. There is a better way.

The discovery of a major cemetery near Ballona Wetlands was not entirely unexpected by local archeologists. Records from the San Gabriel Mission mention recruitment of Tongva from a group of settlements named Washna (also referred to in some historical and scholarly sources as Saa'angna) near the mouth of Ballona Creek. Before the Spanish conquest, Washna was probably the most important Native American center for trade between the mainland and Catalina Island. For some 3,000 years, the Tongva lived in the area encompassing the Ballona Creek flood plain and the Westchester Bluffs.

Local burial grounds were scattered among homes and ceremonial places. Burial of family members near one another was common, much as it was in colonial New England church cemeteries. According to Jordan David, one of the first Tongva monitors on site (the California Environmental Quality Act requires developers to hire indigenous monitors), older bones appear to have been removed, marked with red ochre in ceremonies and then returned to the sides of the graves to make room for the more recently deceased. If the Playa Vista developers continue to dig eastward at the base of the bluffs to build the drainage ditch, several hundred more graves might be found among other settlements.