For millions of Los Angeles-area motorists, the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area flashes by in an instant — a tattered oasis of wetlands, sycamore and oak that punctuates the monotonous sprawl of industrial parks, cinder-block sound walls and residential cul-de-sacs along the 60 Freeway and Rosemead Boulevard.
But to Andrew Salas, chairman of the Gabrieleño-Kizh tribe, this area still echoes with the voices of his ancestors, who called it Shevaanga. “What Beverly Hills is to Los Angeles, Shevaanga was to the true first people of the Los Angeles Basin,” Salas said. Few area residents would ever guess that another culture thrived here for thousands of years amid a landscape of oak and walnut woodlands riven with waterways teeming with steelhead trout and prowled by wolves and grizzly bears. But now, Shevaanga is among hundreds of sites drawing new attention in the “Mapping Los Angeles Landscape History” project.
The project is the result of an unlikely partnership of three tribes — Chumash, Tataviam, and Kizh-Gabrieleño — as well as geographers, historians, biologists, and computer scientists from USC, UCLA and Cal State‘s Northridge, Los Angeles and Long Beach campuses. Undergraduate students from Accelcraft Institute of Geoinformatics and Telangana University, in India, also helped to extract the elevations of over 15 million individual points located on historical topographic maps. “We show how Los Angeles is rooted in an ancient metropolis of trading centers and seafaring communities governed by royal families and surrounded by forests and grasslands carefully managed to magnify the abundance of natural resources,” he said.
