Valley Tribal Trivia Was Way Off the Mark

As a professional archeologist who has worked in California for more than 20 years, I read with some interest the “Do You Know Your Valley?” historical pop quiz (Dec. 27).

I was surprised by one answer. To the question “Name some of the Native American tribes that were represented in the Valley,” you gave as the answer “Chumash, Tongva, Yokut, Alliklik and Kitanemuk. All spoke dialects of Shoshone.” This is completely incorrect.

While the Tongva did indeed live at the far northeastern corner of the San Fernando Valley ( Tujunga is a modern corruption of their name), there is no evidence that the Chumash, Alliklik or Kitanemuk similarly resided within the confines of the San Fernando Valley.

All groups, however, can be said to have been either close or distant neighbors to what we now call the San Fernando Valley. The Chumash lived on the coastal strip northward from Topanga Creek. The Alliklik (also known as the Tataviam) lived in the Sierra Pelona and upper Santa Clara River drainage. And the Kitanemuk lived in the Tehachapi Mountains and adjacent northwestern Mojave Desert. The Yokuts, the most populous and geographically most expansive of all California native peoples, lived in the San Joaquin Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills from the vicinity of present-day Bakersfield to Stockton, nowhere near the San Fernando Valley.

Finally, while the Tongva and Kitanemuk did indeed speak Shoshonean languages (also known as Takic forms of the Uto-Aztecan language family), they did not speak a “dialect of Shoshone,” which is a separate language unto itself. To this day linguists and archeologists are still arguing about what language the Alliklik spoke and even about who these people were. The Alliklik may have spoken a Shoshonean language, or they may have not.

More specifically, the Chumash spoke a Hokan language, while the Yokuts spoke a Penutian tongue. Both Chumash and Yokuts are completely unlike any Shoshonean language, as different as, say, modern Norwegian is from Japanese.

The writer(s) of this article do not, indeed, “know their Valley,” at least its prehistoric period. Next time they deal with archeological subjects, they should do a little more research.

Nevertheless, the idea of the article was a good one. Most modern residents of Southern California are hard-pressed to recall events of only 50 years ago, much less 500 or 5,000 years into the past.

BRIAN D. DILLON, Ph.D.

North Hills