“Breath of the ocean” in the Tongva language (Shoson).
The Tongva people have lived in what we call the Greater Los Angeles Basin for thousands of years. Their ancestral home stretched over 4,000 square miles, with the sacred centre in today’s Long Beach. They explored the Pacific coast in their sewn plank canoes called ti’at. Even though they long preceeded the Spanish, Mexican, and then the Americans, the Tongva people were only recognized in 1994 under state law. The development of this area was achieved through the enslaved labour of the Tongva people.
I was reading EA Hanks’ The 10 : A Memoir of Family and the Open Road when I learned about Moomat Ahiko. I had picked it up, off the shelves at my local library a few days before. The author is writing Santa Monica.
In March 2004, Santa Monica City Council changed the name from State Route 187 to Moomat Ahiko. This is an access road that connects the Pacific Coast Highway and Ocean Avenue. Moomat Ahiko was among nearly one hundred names submitted in an online poll. Others included Bum Boulevard, Liberal Lane, and Pothole Place.
“I started to think about how you don’t understand a place simply because you’re in it. You don’t understand a place because you’re from there. You don’t even understand a place just because you’re new to it. I started thinking about how place informs person. I began to wonder whether if you don’t understand where you are, you don’t understand yourself. So Moomat Ahiko became way more important to me than most people would judge as normal.” – EA Hanks
Who is EA Hanks? I find out in the next paragraph.
“I am a very good example of a certain species of person wholly of Los Angeles but not from Los Angeles: I am a kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage. My father is the actor Tom Hanks; my mother was his first wife, Susan Dillingham. They married when my older brother, Colin, was already two years old and divorced when I was five.”
I’m on page 11 and I’m enjoying the weaving, the storytelling of place and geography. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked it up. Perhaps it’s a book for you.