Puvunga

Indigenous sacred site in Long Beach, California, US

Puvunga (alternate spellings: Puvungna or Povuu'nga) is an ancient village and sacred site of the Tongva nation, the Indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin, and the Acjachemen, the Indigenous people of Orange County. The site is now located within California State University, Long Beach and the surrounding area. The Tongva know Puvunga as the "place of emergence" and it is where they believed "their world and their lives began". Puvunga is an important ceremonial site and is the end to an annual pilgrimage for the Tongva, Acjachemen, and Chumash. Another similar (but larger) Tongva site is Kuruvungna Springs on the grounds of University High School in Los Angeles.

Puvunga can mean "the place of the gathering" or "in the ball," depending on the source. Rare bird species have been identified on the site by the Audubon Society.]] Puvunga once stood on a rounded knoll or small hill above the expansive wetlands, now known as the Los Cerritos Wetlands, of the San Gabriel River. The Pacific Ocean, now pushed several miles west by settlers and commercial development, came to the bluff of the village. now sometimes referred to in archaeological terms as Puvungna East, and the village of Lupukngna, located down the coastline at the mouth of the Santa Ana River. With the establishment of Mission San Gabriel in 1771, Between 1785 and 1805, mission records noted numerous baptisms of villagers from Puvunga, indicating that the village was likely depleted shortly after. Children often died very young at the missions. One missionary at Mission San Gabriel reported that three out of every four children born died before age two. In 1844, Hugo Reid referred to the village as Pubugna and stated it could still be identified as existing at Rancho Los Alamitos, which was a subdivision of Rancho de los Nietos. John Peabody Harrington identified the presence of shell middens in the Rancho Los Alamitos area. At this time, Harrington consulted three Indigenous informants, Jose de Los Santos Juncos, José de Grácia Cruz, and a "very old informant" Guorojos, who each referred to the site as the village, referred to as Puvu'na and Puvu, as being in Los Alamitos. Harrington's report of these events was published in 1933. On Christmas Eve, 1952, a burial site of Puvunga was discovered about a mile north of the California State University, Long Beach campus, (then referred to as Long Beach State College) when workers of the L. S. Whaley Company uncovered two dozen ancestral remains and funerary objects in the construction of a housing development. In 1952, an article for the Long Beach Press Telegram wrote that the "ruins might be part of Pubunga an ancient 'holy city.'" On the first official Earth Day celebration, organic gardens were established in the of Puvunga that were still undeveloped and available to the public. The garden site was used to grow various foods for personal consumption. These remains were placed in CSULB's archaeology lab. Archaeologists in 1974 wrote that the Tongva "abruptly abandoned the site in the early 1800s, only a year or so before the first white family took possession of the land". Two other sites were included in the National Register: the adjacent LAn 234 and LAn 306, located just east of campus on the grounds of the historic Rancho Los Alamitos. In 1979, a reburial of an individual disinterred in 1972 occurred. After this reburial, campus workers erected a small engraved wooden sign at the site, which read "Gabrieleno Indians once inhabited this site, Puvunga, the birthplace of Chungicnish, law giver and god." A burial site in the greater Puvunga area was disturbed in the construction of the neighborhood of Hellman Ranch in the adjacent city of Seal Beach. The site is sometimes archaeologically referred to as Puvungna East or as the village of Motuucheyngna, because of its proximity to Puvugna and in acknowledgment of the large area the village once comprised. About 35 bodies were disturbed in the development of Hellman Ranch, along with numerous artifacts of the Tongva. Local self identified Indigenous groups, such as the Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation were not consulted in regard to the dumping. This resulted in a legal challenge by the tribe which halted the dumping in October 2019. The legal proceedings were stalled due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Chairman of the tribe Matias Belardes commented on how the dumping reflected a shift in attitude from the university since the 1992 lawsuit:<blockquote>We’ve had a decent relationship since then [the 1992 incident when CSULB attempted to build a strip mall on the site] [We] find it disrespectful and disheartening. Ever since that lawsuit, it was thought that there would be a better understanding of what that site means to us. Somewhere along the way, there’s been a disconnect. Now we’re back to square one after all these positive things from the original lawsuit all those years ago. We thought we were past it already. It shouldn’t have come to this. The university should know the site's significance, what it means to the tribes, and what you can and can’t do on the property. In August 2020, the California Office of Historical Preservation criticized the university of damaging the site. In January of the next year, the university's president issued a message claiming that rumors of building on the site of Puvungna were untrue. Three months later a report showed that the university did have plans of building another parking lot on the site. The same month, a number of organizations and tribal nations sent governor Gavin Newson a letter, requesting him to restore Puvungna. Removing the construction debris is not the responsibility of the University under the settlement.