Mapping Indigenous LA is a series of story maps that uncover the multiple layers of indigenous Los Angeles through digital storytelling and oral history with community leaders, youth and elders from indigenous communities throughout the city. A map of Los Angeles does not tell the story of its people. In a megalopolis like Los Angeles, this is a story that is often invisible to policy makers and even the city’s notion of itself as a global crossroads. This story includes layered, sedimented cultural geographies of Indigenous Los Angeles that includes the Gabrielino/Tongva and Tataviam who struggle for recognition of their sacred spaces and recognition as a nations, American Indians who were removed from their lands and displaced through governmental policies of settler colonialism, and indigenous diasporas from Latin America and Oceania where people have been displaced by militarism, neoliberal economic policies, and overlapping colonial histories. When we consider Pacific Islander and Latin American Indigenous Diasporas, Los Angeles has the largest indigenous population of any city in the US. While many would argue that there is not one Los Angeles but multiple LAs, what is less known is that there are multiple indigenous LAs whose histories are layered into the fabric of the city. Indigenous LA is about how the original peoples of the Los Angeles- basin (and islands) relate specifically to this land and how subsequent relocations and migrations of indigenous peoples have reworked space, place, and the meaning of these new racialities and concepts of indigeneity.

Presented at the IDRH Digital Humanities Forum 2016: Places, Spaces, Sites, University of Kansas, October 1st, 2016