After nearly 200 years, the Tongva community has land in Los Angeles County that is largely inaccessible to members of other Native American tribes. This photo is all he got for all his hard work.
John Fyfe-Foster is a member of the Yuma Tewa Pueblo and an organizer with the Native American Resource Center in Los Angeles. He has lived in Los Angeles for 15 years and his parents moved there in the 1960s.
Fyfe-Foster says that when his parents moved to Los Angeles from Michigan, they brought with them their traditions, including their traditional dress, basketry, and weaving.
When they moved to Los Angeles, Fyfe-Foster says his parents believed that the white people in Los Angeles would embrace their cultural practices. Instead, his parents saw the racism and segregation that existed in the United States.
Fyfe-Foster’s parents were not wealthy and they wanted to live in a home that was owned by a Native American tribe. They were taken to a home by another Native American family but the family was also from a tribe that didn’t have a home.
Fyfe-Foster’s parents decided that their children would be raised in the traditional way.
Fyfe-Foster says that his mother had a hard time adjusting to life as a white-collar worker. While she earned a good living, she still struggled with the racism she saw in the Los Angeles area, including on the freeway.
Fyfe-Foster says that the racism and segregation she saw in Los Angeles was a constant reminder of the racist way the United States treated Native Americans centuries ago.
“When you live here, you’re in a white supremacist society with a system of laws that say that whites have the right to do whatever they want to do with us,” Fyfe Foster said.
Fyfe-Foster says that not only are many of the things he heard from others about his parents’ experiences when he was a child accurate, but there is also evidence of