Playa Vista Indian Burial Ground
This entry is poorly constructed and probably barely legible to anyone other than myself. I'm not proud of those facts, I'm just lazy. You have been warned. So, I was listening to the pilot episode of a new radio show called Curiosity Aroused, which was a pretty cool show (you can hear it here:In one segment, the host ( Rebbecca Watson of ) discusses media coverage of an alleged ghost sighting at a gas station (what a lousy place to spend eternity). As usual, one of the various folks interviewed by the news crew comments that 'this place used to be an Indian burial ground.' An Indian burial ground.
How many times have you heard this one? It's as if the entire continent has seen Poltergeist one too many times. Feel uneasy at your house?
Must be built on an Indian burial ground. See something weird at your office? Must be built on an Indian burial ground. I wonder what kind of burial grounds the British blame their misfortune on.
Sep 08, 2007 Playa Vista (for Cass!). What gives me the creeps is that PV is one of the largest indian burial ground sites in CA. (from Vista Del Mar to the west.
Incidentally, I once worked in an office building that actually WAS built on an Indian burial ground. What's more, we frequently had human bones in the office. Want to know what happened there? Absolutely nothing - unless you count the soul-crushing boredom of Monday morning staff meetings. Wait a minute.maybe the human remains in the office from our excavations put a curse on the building, and the burial ground put another curse on the building, and the two curses ate each other! Hmmm.I may yet make a name for myself in parapsychology! I also once spent a week carting human remains (mostly bone, but also some preserved soft tissue) around in the trunk of my car - at the insistence of the Sheriff Coroner's office I might add - and other than some trouble with my starter and alternator, my car shows no signs of being haunted or cursed (and I'm inclined to chalk the electrical troubles up to the fact that my car is 13 years old and has never had any part of the electrical system replaced - though it is fun to yell obscenities at the spirits when my car won't start on a cold morning).
Still, those were remains of white people, and therefore most of my fellow honkies will likely superstitiously not believe that they have the power of ' dem Indian bones. But I digress. Back to the main point.anytime I talk to someone who feels uneasy in their home or thinks that they or someone they know has a haunted house, inevitably the old 'built on an Indian Burial Ground' trope gets brought out. If all of the places that were allegedly built on burial grounds were, in fact, built on burial grounds, then I can say with confidence that there are more dead people in North America than there were ever alive people on the continent. For those who doubt the truth of that statement, I'll have you know that I arrived at that conclusion by using my archaeological training to compile and analyze data before pulling a conclusion completely out of my ass. I used to work in the Central Coast Archaeological Information Center at UC Santa Barbara.
This facility houses all of the records for all recorded archaeological sites within Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties. In other words, this was the perfect place to examine the claim that any of the alleged haunted places in the county were built on Indian burial grounds. So, I looked at the locations of several places that I had heard were haunted due to being built on burial grounds.
One was built on a location that used to hold a flake scatter (where a couple of Chumash fellows had been manufacturing or modifying stone tools - but where there would have been no burials), all others were built on 'archaeologically sterile' ground - no sites of any kind, including burials. I did find a few buildings that were actually built on burial grounds. One was a building where I would eventually work, as described above (and where, when questioned, nobody who worked there had ever experienced anything odd at all).
One was a museum that one would think was ripe for ghost stories for a number of reasons, and, yet, it had none at all. And one was a physics/engineering laboratory where several friends worked, and none of them had ever experienced anything that they would consider strange. Oh, and one was a sewage treatment plant - unpleasant, but decidedly not haunted by anyone's estimation.
So, the places that really did hold burial grounds were all not haunted. The places that were supposedly haunted but definitely did not have burial grounds all had the rumor of a burial ground attached to them. That should tell you something. And yet, stories of hauntings due to burial grounds continue to proliferate. When the folks behind the Amityville hoax decided to pull their prank, they even concocted an Indian burial ground/insane asylum story as part of the hoax. My personal favorite rant about the horrors of Indian Burial grounds comes from this lunatic:., who draws some rather odd conclusions about how people behave around these sites. For example, if people avoid burial grounds, how do we account for the vandalism often seen at these sites?
Also, I got a good laugh from the claim that construction workers stop work at burial sites out of fear of the supernatural. If there's not an archaeologist like myself or a Native American monitor present to stop them, construction crews will blow right through burial sites without a second thought. Don't believe me? Go to Google and type in ' Playa Vista Gabrielino Burials'. When the construction company has the legal right to plow through, or else the management thinks that they won't be caught, they do just that. The fear of the supernatural does nothing to stop them.
What's curious is that so many of these stories allege specifically Indian burial grounds. While you will occasionally here about a more run-of the mill white-bread cracker cemetery being the source of a haunting, it is usually the Native Americans who get the blame. Well, I don't know for certain, but I suspect that it has to do with three things: 1.
Unlike most historic cemeteries, prehistoric Native American cemeteries don't have clear surviving grave markers that are obvious to the layman, and therefore it becomes an untestable hypothesis to most folks (it's essentially a 'god of the gaps' argument - in the face of ignorance a questionable conclusion is drawn, and since you can't disprove it, it must be true! The illogic of the position should be pretty obvious).
Even prior to the current re-evaluation of North American colonialism, most folks at least agreed that the native peoples of the continent weren't happy with the European who were the ancestors of many of us, and therefore would have a motive for wanting to do all manor of horrible things to them - apparently including annoying them by moving their descendants car keys and knocking picture frames off of walls - hardly a fitting retort to genocidal policies, really. There is a, frankly, racist notion that non-white people are somehow mystically powerful and therefore terrifying and not to be trusted (which has been a recurring theme throughout much of western colonial history - incidentally, the current obsession of young white people with India is typically little more than a current manifestation of this long-running racist belief) and this notion that even the dead non-white people are mystically powerful seems to be little other than a continuation of this tendency.
So, next time someone tells you that a place is haunted due to being built on an Indian burial ground, point at the person and laugh. You'll be glad you did. For some reason, the people of Santa Barbara consider themselves the 'Central Coast' despite the fact that they are clearly in Southern California - but it gets even goofier when you consider that the Information Center in Fullerton is called the South Central Coast Information Center - there is nothing central about Fullerton!
It's in fucking Orange County! San Luis Obispo County could arguably be described as the South Central Coast - but not Orange County. This guys has other entries with titles such as, and no I am not making this up, 'Gall Bladder Disease and Demons', 'Car shopping and Deliverance', 'Dolls, toys, and stuffed animals - better burn them too', 'Candles - Don't Burn Them; Get Them Out Of Your Home!' , 'Diabetes - Squid like demons attack ten parts of your body', and oh so many more.
Oh, and my favorite sentence on the site, from the page on doctors, is this 'The dental symbol is a triangle in a circle. This same symbol is the highest satanic symbol.' Your dentist is a S atan worshiper. You can go to yourself to see the true insanity of it all.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – For at least 6,000 years the village of Sa’Angna, was home to members the Gabrieleno Tongva tribe, now a lawsuit in federal court seeks to save what remains of the settlement from becoming a mixed-use upscale development project. At issue is a development created by the Playa Capital Corporation, also known as Playa Vista, called “The Village at Playa Vista” which sits below Loyola Marymount University in an area known as the Ballona wetlands. Included in the project is a drainage ditch that the company is calling the “Playa Vista Riparian Corridor.” The ditch is loosely based on an old creek, which has, like most natural waterways in the Los Angeles basin, been rerouted and channeled. Apparently the re-channeled ditch cuts right through a large cemetery with remains presumed to be of the Gabrieleno Tongva tribe, the native tribe of the Los Angeles basin. Though more continue to be found, currently it is estimated that the remains of some 300 people have been unearthed due to the project.
One eyewitness has even described it as a “pond of skulls and ribcages.” Tribal sources claim that the burial area was used during a period of time from about 6,000 years ago until the 19th century. Eyewitnesses have reported that, in addition to human remains there are also artifacts such as waterproof baskets and other items dating back several centuries. “What you have here are several different eras of burial grounds in one area,” said Johntommy Rosas, the vice-chairman of one of the bands of Gabrieleno Tongvas.
Rosas brought the suit against the project and in a David versus Goliath manner has stubbornly refused to back down. He is asking for a stop to the project along with punitive damages listed at over half a billion dollars. A judge recently denied his opponents’ calls for dismissal.
Rob Wood is an environmental specialist with the California Native American Heritage Commission. He believes that there are both moral and legal issues to decide here and accuses the developer as being stubborn in regard to the moral issue. He recounts several instances where developers went out of their way to restructure developments. Wood claims that much of the issue could be resolved if the drainage ditch were moved “just 200 yards” away to avoid the burial site, something that he said the Playa Capital Corporation has refused to do. While the moral issue of digging up an entire cemetery is fairly obvious, the legal issue is a bit more complicated. Apparently a 1991 agreement that expired after 10 years was automatically renewed in 2001. Wood claims that it is illegal to automatically extend the 10-year agreement, something that Rosas also alleged in his lawsuit.
Among other things, Rosas is also arguing that the project is a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and argues that these kinds of cases should be viewed as civil rights cases. “Though people don’t really look at these kinds of cases in this way, there’s really no other way to look at it than a clear civil rights violation,” said Wood. Part of the rules governing American Indian remains require that a “most likely descendant” be appointed to make recommendations on mitigation measures. However, the issue with “most likely descendants” is further complicated by infighting among Gabrieleno Tongva tribal members. Apparently members of a new Santa Monica faction of the tribe signed off on the project.
However, these members in question did so before the Santa Monica faction broke off. The other two factions – none of which are federally recognized – are based in San Gabriel, to the east of Los Angeles, and in Culver City on Los Angeles’ west side. The Santa Monica faction is a recent break-off from the San Gabriel faction and has been in the news for a controversial proposed casino project in Compton, a section of Los Angeles. Wood and Rosas claim that a few members of the Santa Monica faction are on the payroll at Playa Capital Corporation and are responsible for signing off on the project. Calls to Playa Capital to check on the veracity of these claims were referred to Steve Sugerman at the Sugerman Communications Group in Los Angeles. Calls to Steve Sugerman were not returned.
Ironically, the California Native American Heritage Commission is also named in the suit though Rosas has been working with the Commission to stop the project. Both Rosas and Wood said the reason for this is that the Commission lacks enforcement authority to stop such a project. Efforts to stop the project have revealed the difficulty that American Indians have in stopping or at least mitigating such projects despite such relatively recent laws such as the Native American Graves Repatriation Act, which does not cover cases such as this one. There are a tangle of laws governing cemeteries that seemingly provide a double standard for American Indian remains. The problem is that American Indian graves from pre-European contact, in the simplest terms, are regarded as archeological sites and not cemeteries.
Most cemeteries in California are governed under state health and safety codes and stem from an 1872 law. However, since most American Indian burial grounds predate the 1872 law, a court case in 1982 determined they are not included in the same governing authority as all cemeteries after that law was enacted. The project can only be altered or stopped by the agencies that signed the original 1991 agreement. Because the project is situated in what Rosas describes as “the last remaining coastal wetland in the Los Angeles basin the 1991 agreement had to be signed off on by state and federal agencies as dictated by the 1972 Clean Water Act. The original signatories to the agreement are the Army Corps of Engineers, the developer, the Office of Historic Preservation, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
Indian Burial Ground
Also, the city of Los Angeles will be acting as the lead agency in the California state environmental review process. Thus far none of the signatories has tried to stop the project. The only other entity that could at least make recommendations to mitigate the project, or at least move the drainage ditch, are the archeologists on the project. Rosas alleged that this is not likely given that the archeological firm on this project, Statistical Research Incorporated (SRI), is employed by the Playa Capital. On their Web site SRI estimated that the project would cost $10 million, which is what they are going to presumably get.
Both Wood and Rosas claim that various archeologists have walked off the project in protest. The project had raised environmental concerns and one of the original groups that had planned to build at the site was DreamWorks, famed director Steven Spielberg’s film making company.
Indian Burial Ground Candy
However, a portion of the marshlands were eventually set aside by the developers to remain untouched, a move that Wood characterizes as necessary since the donated land could not be developed anyway. Spielberg also eventually dropped out of building at the site in the late 1990s.