Dorame is tribal chairman of the Gabrielino Tongva Indians of Southern California, and also the state-designated Most Likely Descendant for the Playa Vista project. That means he’s the direct lineal descendant of the Indians who lived on the Playa Vista site, and it’s his job to consult with the biggest development on the Westside in 50 years and decide what to do with all the Indian remains that have been found there.

The Native American graves and artifacts on Playa Vista have always been a concern. Playa Vista and its can-do president, Steve Soboroff, had a plan in place since 1991 (renewed in 2001) that would govern how to deal with these “archeological sites.” Archeologists have known for decades about the many village sites along the Westchester bluffs, which had been inhabited for between 5,000 and 7,000 years. The various incarnations of the Gabrielino Tongva tribe, of course, knew full well. Some of them had buried ancestors there as recently as the 1960s.

Nobody, however, was prepared for what has come out of the ground at Playa Vista. Or that the remains would be held in limbo for so long.

To date, 411 sets of Native American remains have been unearthed during the construction of Playa Vista, most of them from one small plot at the base of the bluffs, down below the Loyola Marymount campus. This represents, archeologists say, one of the largest known Native American burial grounds in Southern California, and one of the biggest in North America. The remains have been, as Dorame has testified, “ripped from the earth,” deposited in numbered boxes, and stored in a trailer on the development site. Some of them have been there for three or four years. (CityBeat reported on the excavation of this site on September 30, 2004.) Although a Native American monitor is on site whenever remains are unearthed, Dorame claims he’s never been allowed to see the items in storage, to pray over them, or to give them the ceremony they deserve. He says he’s not even sure exactly which trailer they’re in.

“Well, since [they uncovered] the large excavation of human remains, the 391-plus, they have not been identified as to where they’re at, or in terms of where they’re going to place them,” says Dorame by phone from another construction location. “We’re still waiting for a reply from Playa Vista to make that determination.”

Steve Sugarman, a spokesman for Playa Vista, says that the company has been in dialogue with Dorame. “We talked to Mr. Dorame in December 2006, and we did discuss these issues with him,” he says. But, he adds, “There are a lot of government agencies involved in these archeological resources. They are being analyzed and catalogued, following all the protocols that were set in place. And what we told Mr. Dorame in December is that we were projecting reinterment in a 2010, 2011 time frame.”

That’s a lot more years than the Native American community figured, and that’s mostly because a historical hitch in the law makes this plot of 391-plus graves not technically a cemetery, and thus neither Dorame nor the tribes have many rights as to where the remains go. Under the 1872 cemetery law, public cemeteries can only be created by the declaration of bureaucrats – no such help this time – or by continuous use for a period of at least five years. Since the Native Americans were mostly driven out of the area or forced to assimilate by the early 1870s, there’s been no way of proving continuous use since those days. An important court case in the 1980s called Wana the Bear v. Community Construction, which involved 200 Miwok graves in California, addressed this exact situation and found that there was simply no remedy for native families in the courts. The federal law governing tribal artifacts, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, did not apply to this site because these Gabrielino people lack federal recognition as a tribe.

The graves at Playa Vista, then, are an archeological site. Under the state Public Resources Code, when the coroner’s office identifies remains as being Native American in origin, the state Native American Heritage Commission assigns a Most Likely Descendant to oversee their re-burial. Those MLDs stay pretty busy, since Indian remains and artifacts lie literally everywhere under modern America, and Dorame is a seasoned expert at the “cultural resources” biz. But his recommendations to Playa Vista are only that: recommendations. If Playa Vista continues to stall, he’s powerless to do anything about it.

“There’s not a violation of the law, in the sense that the commission cannot force the landowner to rebury those remains,” says Dave Singleton, program analyst for the NAHC, who is quick to point out that his organization is not against the development, per se. “But it’s certainly an intolerable situation from the standpoint of the native people, and it’s very disturbing to the commission.”

Numbers shouldn’t matter here, but they do. As bodies came out of the ground by the shovelful, outcry grew. And now, as Playa Vista roars into Phase II, building an entire new ZIP code with 2,600 new homes (there will be 5,846 total in both phases), a huge new Village Center shopping area designed by the Grove’s Rick Caruso, a business campus, and even a new training center for the L.A. Clippers, this situation has inspired a flurry of new legislation meant to address the problem of Indian graves. Should these circumstances arise in the future, construction might stop dead. But it’s too late for the ancestors at Playa Vista.

“The landowner has to reverse the situation: If they were Most Likely Descendant and these were their grandparents or ancestors, they would want to not leave them out, exposed, and not back in the earth. So you would do the same things, give human respect and consideration to them,” says Dorame.

Sugarman counters that, “We conducted this in the most sensitive manner we knew how to do, including the important role of Native American monitors on the site every day. We hired the best archeologist in the country, and they were on hands and knees with minute instruments, toothbrushes, to do this work in a meticulous way.”

But Dorame adds: “What I’m dealing with is to make sure that our ancestors are put back in the ground. That’s why I am there. And that is my goal right now, is to put those ancestors back in the ground.”

Boxes of Bones

Wendy Teeter is frustrated, too. In her office as the curator of archeology at UCLA’s Fowler Museum, she goes over a map that shows all the numbered archeological sites that ring the former lagoon and tidal marsh on which Playa Vista sits today, pointing out major Shoshonean villages like Guaspet. The excavations for Playa Vista are going to bring a huge wealth of material to her world, but she’s worried that the cost, in moral terms, is too high. One of these years, her museum is going to receive all the non-human and non-burial remains from the Playa Vista site. At present, she knows there will be at least 600 one-square-foot boxes of materials, among the most significant finds she’s ever encountered. But that’s diminished by the loss of the intact grave sites. If Playa Vista would have moved its “riparian corridor” – a drainage ditch along the edge of the bluffs – by only 100 feet, few of these graves need have been disturbed.

“As strictly an archeologist, the cemeteries and the village sites provide an incredible wealth of information,” Teeter says. “We do not see this type of find in Southern California any longer. But that is within a vacuum. It doesn’t take into consideration the Native American viewpoint. Nobody has asked them whether or not they would like to see the information gone out, whether they see this as a valuable resource. So it’s sorta bittersweet, right?”

The property’s unique history made it the last huge piece of beachside Los Angeles left untouched. Developers have lusted after it for decades. The original 14,000-acre Rancho la Ballona, owned by the Machado and Talamantes families, was broken up when significant portions were acquired by the Culver family during the move toward statehood in the 1850s – becoming Culver City. But a huge chunk remained intact and was purchased in the 1940s by Howard Hughes to be the site of his aircraft manufacturing business. The Spruce Goose, once the world’s largest aircraft, was built there and stored in a hangar that still stands on the site today. Ironically, those buildings are protected as having historical interest. Hughes engineers pulled big loads of Indian village remnants off the bluffs for use as fill and deposited them down the middle of the wetland as runways.

A battle raged over the area for years as environmentalists, local residents, and Native American groups tried to block the construction of DreamWorks Studio by moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. But when the studio pulled out, the situation got worse, with only the high-priced condo and office park development left, leading to ongoing lawsuits claiming that the promised jobs have evaporated and been replaced by a huge influx of new residents, traffic, a potential methane-gas hazard, and the destruction of the important Native American sites. Calls to the L.A. City Attorney’s office regarding these lawsuits and the reinterment dispute were acknowledged but not returned by press time.

Teeter points out that the archeology firm hired by Playa Vista to actually excavate the site and catalog the findings, Statistical Research, Inc., will create reports before the burial remains are reinterred. SRI’s lead archeologist on the Playa project, when reached by phone, explained that he was prevented from giving any comment. But Teeter has had opportunity several times to plead for the integrity of those graves.

“[Gabrielino Ti’At Society leader] Cindy Alvitre and I met with Steve Soboroff to discuss protection of what the Gabrielino community considers a cemetery,” she says. “And we were reminded throughout the discussions that it was not legally defined as a cemetery.”

As legalistic as this might sound, Teeter said she didn’t think Soboroff was being cynical in his request for dialogue. He just didn’t see any way to save the graves without slowing down the construction.

The burial grounds, as it was discovered, lay in the path of a designated riparian zone, required under a 404 wetlands permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers because significant portions of Playa Vista were built on wetlands. Anyone who has followed the tangled litigation history of the Playa Vista site will recall that a compromise to protect wetlands caused about 70 percent of the Playa Vista site to be set aside as restored wetlands or open space, with the state buying all of the land west of Lincoln Boulevard and north of Culver Boulevard for restoration.

That riparian zone stretched through both Phase I and II of Playa Vista and followed the original course of a creek along the bottom of the bluffs. Sabrina Venskus, counsel representing environmental group the Ballona Wetlands Trust, Surfrider Foundation, and Chairman Anthony Morales of the Gabrieleno/Tongva Tribal Council in an ongoing suit challenging the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) used on Playa Vista Phase II, explains that the project’s engineers routed that riparian zone in order to maximize space for buildings and could have done it differently under the permit.

The original creek, she explains, actually runs about 100 feet to the north and thus misses the burial site. But, as part of the 404 permit, Playa Vista was allowed to move off the creekbed and get closer to the bluffs. When the graves were discovered, Teeter, Alvitre, and other Indian advocates asked Soboroff and Playa Vista to move the riparian zone back into the creekbed, keeping the graves intact and even giving the project credits for restoring an original wetland. The NAHC filed a complaint, asking for the excavation to stop while this was sorted out. When Phase II came up for a vote in the L.A. City Council soon after, then-Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa was the lone “no,” citing concerns about the EIR and the burial sites. Soboroff, however, refused to change the ditch, saying he feared that any changes to the 404 would open the project up to even more lawsuits. Venskus says she’s not convinced the Army Corps wouldn’t have allowed it.

“That permit from the Army Corps, my understanding is that that was litigated by the opponents all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, so there were tremendous delays in implementing that permit,” says Sugarman. “And that permit was very specific about the location.”

Venskus says: “I think they didn’t want to move it 100 feet so they would have more room to make more money, and to hell with the Native Americans, and to hell with one of the largest Native American burial grounds in the country, and to hell with the NAHC. That’s my guess.”

The Remains in Trailer B

Sam Dunlap says all this talk about not knowing where the remains are is just bunk. “They’re in Trailer B on site,” he says. “They’ve been there a couple years now.” He was just out at the site a couple weeks ago, he says, to watch them relocate some of the burial dirt; once remains are removed from the ground, SRI picks up all the earth from the burial sites, puts it in big rolloff dumpsters, and keeps that, too. As tribal secretary for the Gabrielino/Tongva council, Dunlap has been a Native American monitor on the site for many years. Like nearly every Native American person contacted for this story, he’s not so much worried about how the bones came out of the ground anymore. He’s worried about how they’re going back.

“Since I have no control over the permitting process, or keeping the environmental groups from filing lawsuits, then I will deal with the job that’s in front of me, and that’s to monitor the excavations and to be with my ancestors as they’re being taken out of the earth,” says Dunlap. “And for me, that’s a rather sacred duty, and I think it should be for all Native Americans.”

Those Native Americans involved at Playa Vista, you’ll have noticed by now, all claim the same lineage, but they don’t use the same tribal names. Most are variations on the Gabrielino, meaning those Indians in the general vicinity of the San Gabriel Mission that dominated the area’s culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. But they call themselves the Gabrielino/Tongva, the Gabrielino Band of Mission Indians of California, the Coastal Gabrieleno, the Tongva Ancestral Territorial Tribal Nation, and others. They don’t all get along perfectly well. The names differ slightly because of wearying political, economic, and sometimes personal spats.

But they all agree that the time has long passed to have the ancestors back in the ground. And that Indians need more power over their past.

“Whatever they need to do to complete their archeological report, whether that be cataloging and lab work and all that, I don’t think they should be held out of the ground until those reports are finished,” says Anthony Morales. “Heck, those reports could take another couple years. By then, it’ll be six, seven years out of the ground. That, right there, is criminal. That’s insane. They need to be put down in the ground immediately.”

Morales led a crew of activists who tried to get legislation passed to rectify the situation at Playa Vista, and put some teeth into the law requiring developers or landowners to recognize Indian authority in repatriating artifacts and remains. In the end, he didn’t succeed in gaining any power over the situation at Playa Vista, but did pass Assembly Bill 2641, which was signed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and became law on January 1. The bill requires that the discovery of “multiple Native American human remains” trigger a new mitigation procedure, under which the big change is a new “discuss and confer” process between the landowner and the designated Most Likely Descendant. That process, which at Playa Vista evidently has no time limit, would now involve, under state Public Resource Code, “the meaningful and timely discussion and careful consideration of the views of each party, in a manner that is cognizant of all parties’ cultural values, and where feasible, seeking agreement.”

Which means MLDs like Robert Dorame might be able to set a firm time limit for operations like Playa Vista.

Another significant development was the passage of state Senate Bill 18 in 2005, which requires that Native Americans now must now be consulted when California cities and counties draw up new land-use plans. This change brings the tribes into the planning stages earlier, before sites are destroyed.

After the Playa Vista experience, the City of Los Angeles would probably want that involvement. As the lead agency for most permits and planning on Playa Vista, the city has been party to countless lawsuits, and Native Americans have maintained a heavy presence in all of them, mostly trying to undo things that have already been done. The district’s city councilman, Bill Rosendahl, has now called for a meeting to deal specifically with the reburial issue between the city, tribal leaders, and Playa Vista, to be held as soon as the ongoing challenge to the EIR is settled in the courts, and to which everyone has agreed.

And Playa Vista, for its part, keeps on pushing the issue, adding what the Indians see as insult to injury. The company has continually maintained that it is proud of the archeological work being done there.

So proud, in fact, it would like to be reimbursed. In January, the L.A. City Council approved 13-0 a request from Playa Vista for $11.4 million in Mello Roos bond money to pay for the riparian zone and the related archeological work. Mello Roos funds are typically used for infrastructure during development. Anthony Morales attended that meeting and presented the Native American opinion that this was the wrong use of public monies.

“I have made several appearances!” Morales says. “I’m not a lawyer, but in my heart, as a Native American, I don’t think that that’s a proper use of those monies. Not to pay for the atrocity of uncovering 411 human burials. No, why should you get paid for that destruction, for that atrocity?”

New Power Generation

Sam Dunlap is taking the long view. The only way Native American history is going to be respected, he maintains, is by gaining power. And there’s power in numbers.

“Playa Vista, they’re a developer. This particular developer has had the remains in boxes for a couple of years at least. It’s unfortunate, but there are museums and universities that have had remains for decades and have not repatriated them. It’s not just developers.”

He points out that he’s been organizing around California State University, Long Beach, which has had, according to NAGPRA documents, at least 20 sets of Indian remains since 1953. Last November, he helped organize a Gabrielino/Tongva tribal gathering on the campus, which attracted over 400 members. Those, he points out, were new members. More and more people who claim Native American ancestry have been coming out of the woodwork, especially in the post-casino era, when belonging to a tribe could mean access to the benefits of gambling dollars. The Gabrielino are not about to get a casino anytime soon, since they’re not a federally recognized tribe, but Morales points out that they have received some measure of state recognition as a tribe. Dunlap says his mission is to recruit new members, tell them about their heritage and about the federal repatriation law, NAGPRA, and convince them to demand what is rightfully theirs.

“I grab these new members, and I say, ‘Let me tell ya about NAGPRA, let me tell ya about your heritage.’ There’s a lot of interest in the new membership with these issues. I want to see the membership itself get on board.”

On May 19, he plans the next Gabrielino/Tongva tribal gathering on the Cal State Long Beach campus. He expects another 400 to 500 members.

“I just want to make sure that the university knows that the tribe isn’t just some mythical relic from the past. That it exists. It’s here right now. When they see bones in their museum, maybe they think we’re gone. But when they see 500 people on the campus, maybe they’ll feel differently.

“What I want to do is put political pressure from the members onto the elected representatives. We haven’t been very successful with lawsuits. They didn’t get anywhere. I’m hoping to try a different approach.”

http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=5300&IssueNum=200