Why Don’t You Go Back To Where You Came From?
That is what a Native American tried to tell me once, a long time ago. We then got into a long discussion about exactly where I was supposed to go back to.
The occasion was driving from the Chumash occupation of Point Conception to Los Angeles. We had all been part of the occupation, which was to protest plans to build a natural gas terminal at Point Conception, which the Chumash consider to be the site where the dead leave the Earth to travel to the West. [That project was eventually abandoned, by the way]. This discussion took place as we were driving from Point Conception to literally a few miles from “where I came from” — the hospital in Hollywood, California, where I was born.
But being born in Hollywood was not enough. The spot where that hospital stands was near what were the Tongva villages of YangNa (downtown L.A.) and KaweegNa (Cahuenga), long before I was born. What about my parents? They were born in the Bronx. But that was formerly the territory of the Siwanoy, until they supposedly “sold” it to Thomas Pell in 1654.
What about my grandparents? They came from various parts of “The Pale” — the Jewish settlements in Eastern Europe. But my people were never considered “native” there either. Nearly all of…
