Hear and get familiar with Tongva plant names while hiking Coldwater Canyon Park

Starting Saturday morning, people walking a one and a half mile trail at Coldwater Canyon Park will be able to scan a QR code and hear something new: wiit, the Indigenous word for California oak, and huukat, the word for elderberry, plus 17 other Indigenous names of native plants.

“There's something specific about hearing the language and hearing a person speaking it that lets you know that this place has a richer history,” said Alex Miller, the communications director at TreePeople.

The project’s called The Plants of Tovangaar and it’s a collaboration between TreePeople, Native Americans, university scholars, the Broad and Arts in California Parks Local Parks Grant Program. Tovangaar is the Indigenous name for the land now known as the L.A. Basin.

Coldwater Canyon Park is a 45-acre public park that’s been the headquarters for TreePeople for decades.

The goal is much deeper than to enrich the experience of people walking on a trail. Miller said it answers a question his organization asked itself several years ago.

Coldwater Canyon Park, where TreePeople has its headquarters.

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Courtesy TreePeople

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“How can we create a tour that would both document and allow the 12,000 students that come up here every year to experience these words and this language and let people know that this is a living culture and not something from a museum,” he said.

The Plants of Tovangaar is the latest land-based plants project in Southern California created with significant collaboration with Native Americans.

It wasn’t easy to track down the plant names

UCLA Linguistics Professor Pamela Munro and Tongva-Kumeyaay scholar Virginia Carmelo researched the names. Even though there’s a significant population of Native Americans from Southern California tribes, colonization has decimated the culture of Native peoples.

“People say the language was lost… it's not like we lost our shoes or our brush… it was never lost. It was taken away from us in a very destructive manner," said Carmelo in a recording that’s available on the Plants of Tovangaar project web site.

Carmelo said recovering the words for plants, creating new ones, and recording them for people to hear will bring Native Americans closer to their ancestors and the relationship of those people to the land.

Hearing these native words, she said, will also uplift “the wider community, what we would call the kuyum, the guests. How are they going to take care of this land that we all live on?”

Native Americans having a say in land-based projects

Other land-based, horticultural project in the Los Angeles area include UCLA’s setting aside of a small portion of their botanical garden for Native Americans to cultivate ceremonial plants. Last year, curators with the Broad worked with Native Americans to create Social Forest: Oaks of Tovaangar, a land-based art project that involved the planting of 100 native oaks in Elysian Park. Some of the oaks for that project were at a cluster of natural springs at Kuruvungna Sacred Springs in L.A.’s west side, where Native Americans are caretakers for the property owned by the L.A. Unified School District.