Gabrielino Indians

The California Court of Appeal this week upheld a Superior Court ruling that temporarily blocked Cal State Long Beach from developing a university-owned parcel of land considered sacred to Native Americans. University officials last year unveiled preliminary plans to build shops and faculty housing on the 2.2-acre site, which was once inhabited by the Gabrielinos and is revered as the birthplace of their deity.

American Indians won an emotional victory Friday when a Superior Court judge temporarily blocked Cal State Long Beach from building a mini-mall on 22 acres that the Indians consider a sacred site. Many of the nearly 50 Indians who packed the Los Angeles courtroom hugged and wept after Judge Stephen E. O'Neil's ruling that the land remain undeveloped until the court determines whether the site is culturally significant.

San Gabriel's new high school will be the first public building in the state to honor the Gabrielino Indians. A tribal council meeting in San Gabriel erupted in cheers Sunday when the acting chief of the Gabrielinos unveiled a sign proclaiming "Gabrielino High School." "It's a great honor for our tribe. Many of those at Sunday's meeting were elders who'd struggled for decades to gain recognition for our tribe," said Anthony Morales, acting chief.

For thousands of years, Gabrielino Indians say, they have lived in the Los Angeles Basin. They survived the Spanish missions, Mexican settlers and white developers. Now, a tribe that nearly disappeared is mired in a legal battle over who has the right to control its destiny -- and what role gambling might play in its future.

Veteran archeologist Frank McDowell arrived at Arco's Carson refinery in mid-September, ready to begin a routine excavation of a recently discovered Indian burial site. Instead, he found a mystery. In one of Southern California's most unusual--and possibly most significant--archeological finds is evidence of a human cataclysm that wiped out at least 50 Gabrielinos, including two unborn children, probably about 200 years ago.

Ask Anthony Morales why he wants the federal government to recognize the Gabrielino Indians, and the tribal chairman speaks of social justice. Granting sovereign status to the Gabrielino-Tongva Nation would acknowledge that perhaps as many as 2,000 residents of Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties are descended from natives of the L.A. Basin, whose lands once stretched from the Channel Islands to Laguna Beach to the San Gabriel Mountains.

In five hours of impassioned pleas, environmentalists and the development industry squared off again Tuesday over the future of the California gnatcatcher, this time addressing the federal team that has proposed the bird for protection as a national endangered species. The often-passionate testimony showed that forces on both sides of the long debate haven't lost their momentum, nor their anxieties, when it comes to the tiny Southern California songbird. The purpose of the U.S.

The year was 1928 and the strip was roaring. Swanky nightclubs were a haven of bootlegging and vice. Gamblers whooped and hollered at greyhounds that rounded the local dog track. But this was no budding Las Vegas; this road of iniquity was in west Culver City, along what is now Washington Boulevard.

The California Native American Heritage Commission has strongly recommended against a planned archeological survey of 22 acres of university land at Cal State Long Beach that is considered sacred by American Indians. The nine-member advisory commission concluded that an excavation would damage the prehistoric site, once home to hundreds of Gabrielino Indians. The commissioners have also asked that the university abandon all plans to develop the land.

It was not police or citizen watchdog groups that stopped the taggers who struck Wednesday night at Howard Finn Memorial Park in Tujunga. It was respect. The taggers halted their vandalism on a park wall only inches away from a new, 200-foot historical mural of the Sunland-Tujunga region that was painted by a crew of Southland teen-agers that included ex-taggers.