User:Curtis Clark/Drafts

This is my drafts page
Draft of intro for Tongva people. Very preliminary—please don't edit this until I remove this sentence.

The Tongva, also referred to as the Gabrieleño, Gabrielino, San Gabriel Band, the Fernandeño or Fernardino, and the Kizh Nation are an indigenous people of California, whose traditional territory is in present-day Los Angeles in Southern California, centered on the San Gabriel Mountains area. Their language was a member of the Takic group within the Uto-Aztecan linguistic phylum. It became extinct during the 20th century.

The name Gabrieleño is in reference to the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel set up by the Spanish colonists in 1771. Similarly, the Spanish referred to both the Tongva in the San Fernando Valley and the nearby Tataviam people, who spoke a different language, as Fernandeño, after the Mission San Fernando Rey de España.

Since 2006, there have been four organizations claiming to represent the Tongva: The Gabrielino-Tongva Tribe – also known as the "hyphen" group from the hyphen in their name, the Gabrielino/Tongva Tribe of the Los Angeles Basin – also known as the "slash" group,, the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians, and the Gabrieleño/Tongva Tribal Council of San Gabriel. Two of the groups are the result of a hostile split over the question of building an Indian casino.

Name
The first record of an endonym for the Tongva people was Kizh (also spelled Kij), from 1846. Although subsequent authors equated this with the word for "house" (also often spelled kizh), Hale gives the word for house as kītç in a list where the language was called "Kīj", suggesting that the words were distinct. The term Kizh was generally used at that time to designate the language, and the first comprehensive publication on the language used it.

In 1875, Yarrow indicated that the name Kizh was unknown at Mission San Gabriel, and that the natives called themselves Tobikhar, meaning "settlers", and spoke almost exclusively Spanish. In 1885, Hoffman also referred to the natives as Tobikhar.

The word Tongva was recorded by Merriam in 1903 from a single informant. He spelled it Tong-vā; by his orthography, it would be pronounced,.

The name Tongva has become increasingly preferred as a self-designation since the 1990s, although either "Gabrieleño" or "Gabrielino" is used in every official name. The Gabrieleno/Tongva Tribal Council of San Gabriel on their website give a translation of Tongva as "people of the earth", although there is no independent evidence for this.

The Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians have disavowed the name Tongva and accepted Kizh as the correct endonym, and have argued strongly against the use of "Tongva".