As in New Zealand, so in Los Angeles, the Tongva arrived and physically displaced Hokan groups that were already there. Los Angeles is "Tongva land" only in the sense that they were the last people to "colonize" it before the Europeans.
Phrases like "first nations" or "first people" are literally just ideological propaganda to erase the existence of all the land's waves of previous inhabitants, going back tens of thousands of years. The Vikings were in Greenland before the Inuit: all Inuit are descended from the Thule people of western Alaska, who stared sweeping across the continent 1000 years ago, reaching Greenland around the 13th century. The land is full of stories like this, many of them much more recent -- many "first nations" haven't been in the lands they claim as "ancestral" until long after the arrival of the Europeans (indeed, many ethnically cleansed these lands with the help of European technologies like horses and rifles).
Again, none of this is to condemn anyone -- anyone back then, much less anyone in the present day. It's just to say that the mystification and ethnonationalist rhetoric around "indigeneity" is a fiction fabricated by a particular set of ideological commitments, including a blindness to the fact that non-"white" are in fact no different from "white" people.
As in New Zealand, so in Los Angeles, the Tongva arrived and physically displaced Hokan groups that were already there. Los Angeles is "Tongva land" only in the sense that they were the last people to "colonize" it before the Europeans.
Phrases like "first nations" or "first people" are literally just ideological propaganda to erase the existence of all the land's waves of previous inhabitants, going back tens of thousands of years. The Vikings were in Greenland before the Inuit: all Inuit are descended from the Thule people of western Alaska, who stared sweeping across the continent 1000 years ago, reaching Greenland around the 13th century. The land is full of stories like this, many of them much more recent -- many "first nations" haven't been in the lands they claim as "ancestral" until long after the arrival of the Europeans (indeed, many ethnically cleansed these lands with the help of European technologies like horses and rifles).
Again, none of this is to condemn anyone -- anyone back then, much less anyone in the present day. It's just to say that the mystification and ethnonationalist rhetoric around "indigeneity" is a fiction fabricated by a particular set of ideological commitments, including a blindness to the fact that non-"white" are in fact no different from "white" people.