Tongva

Tongva

Mrs. James Rosemeyre (née Narcisa Higuera), photographed here in 1905, was one of the last fluent Tongva speakers. An informant for the ethnographer C. Hart Merriam, she was the source of the widely used endonym Tongva.
Total population
Approximately 1,700
Regions with significant populations
United States ( California)
Languages
Tongva, English, Spanish
Religion
Traditional tribal religion, Christianity

The Tongva (/ˈtɒŋvə/ TONG-və) are Native Americans who inhabited the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands, an area covering approximately 4,000 square miles (10,000 km²). The Tongva are also known as the Gabrieleño and Fernandeño, names derived from the Spanish missions built near their territory: Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and Mission San Fernando Rey de España. Along with the neighboring Chumash, the Tongva were the most powerful indigenous people to inhabit Southern California. At the time of European contact, they may have numbered 5,000 to 10,000.

Many lines of evidence suggest that the Tongva are descended of Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples from Nevada who moved southwest into coastal Southern California 3,500 years ago. These migrants either absorbed or pushed out the Hokan-speaking peoples in the region. By 500 AD, the Tongva had come to occupy all the lands now associated with them. A hunter-gatherer society, the Tongva traded widely with neighboring peoples. Over time, scattered communities came to speak distinct dialects of the Tongva language, part of the Takic subgroup of the Uto-Aztecan language family. There may have been five or more such dialects (three on the Channel Islands and at least two on the mainland). The Tongva language became extinct in the twentieth century, but a reconstructed form continues to be spoken today.