How my Pothole Complaint Led me to Muse About Eagle Rock's Landscape in City Hall

Sometimes you run across interesting and baffling things when you least expect to. This is what happened to me after the unseasonably high rainfall of a couple of weeks ago when I went to Eagle Rock City Hall to report a large pothole in front of my home.

I wish I could say that I was being altruistic and was worried about people ruining their tires and rims by reporting it, but the fact of the matter was I was getting thunked awake by cars in the middle of the night crashing into the pothole. I was not sleeping well. So I trekked over to City Hall about a mile away from my home to report not just the existence of the pothole but the crucial fact that it was getting bigger by the day.

I don’t know about you, but I generally don’t visit City Hall on a regular basis—I find myself there maybe every couple of years or so. When I have visited it in the past it has been a quick in and out to report on some street maintenance issue.

But this time I arrived a few minutes before ’s field office opened. With nothing much to do, I began pivoting in place and craning my neck upward to review the paintings displayed on three walls in the cramped City Hall lobby. Not unexpectedly, all the artworks depicted historical time periods of Eagle Rock. The one that most caught my eye was a five-foot long piece by Concie Kibbe, painted in 1982.

The painting is of a bucolic scene of a Tongva encampment along a stream just below the large outcropping of what we now call the Eagle Rock. I don’t know if the painting has a title, but there is a sign below it that reads: “1700 Indian Period.” I kept staring at the painting, then back to the sign. I finally realized that what the painting depicted, along with the wording of the sign, made me question the painting’s authority as an historic depiction of the Tongva people and their landscape—the place where we now reside and map as our own. This is not to say that the painter was being malicious with the facts.

What is depicted in the panoramic scene are a Tongva man, standing and pointing, and a woman sitting off to his side, both surveying the valley and looking east and just beyond the Eagle Rock to a bear shown standing on its hind legs. A blue stream meanders through the valley and past a settlement of homes thatched with tule grass, where someone is swimming in the stream. If there is any tension in the scene it can be directed to the bear, which, I presume, if the tableau was to play out, is heading to the stream for a little fishing and the possibility of an encounter with the people swimming in it.

It is springtime and the valley and hillsides are in bloom with poppies, clouds of purple lupine and cacti sprouting white flowers. If I could add anything to the scene it would be more rabbits, birds, deer and elk. This is a beautiful place depicted in a beautiful painting.

Oh, yeah, and I would add some clothes on the Indians. It is this fact that first made me wonder what was being depicted in the painting. As I said, the sign below the painting reads: 1700 Indian Period, but both the Tongvas are completely naked. My understanding is that at the time of Portola’s expedition to Alta California in 1769, men and children may have gone about naked, but that women did not. So I began to question the time period of the painting. Could the artist have been depicting a time way before the 1700s, like the 1500s or the 1200s or earlier? I was stymied, because there is no way of telling from looking at the painting.

I finally came to the conclusion that what was being depicted was not the culmination of 10,000 years of native people living in the Los Angeles basin, but the beginning of time, the Garden of Eden itself, with a California twist—the Tongva couple as stand-ins for Adam and Eve. What I was looking at was a Biblical painting.

The painting projects two other Biblical themes of what life was like before the Spaniards came: Man's dominion over nature (not a value indigenous people share, as I will get to in a minute); and nakedness, synonymous with innocence. The landscape itself is also like the two naked Indians—pristine, unsoiled by the hands of gold seekers.

There's a good book that I was introduced to by my nephew David who lives up in Santa Cruz titled, Tending the Wild, by M. Kat Anderson, which demonstrates how the belief that California Indians did not impact the environment to be utterly false. The abundance of game and edible plants as described by the Spaniards was in actuality a direct result of thousands of years of assistance by indigenous communities. They cleared lands with fire to allow for edible plants to grow and sheltered certain birds so that they could lay eggs that were part of the native diet. California Indians were serious ecologists, and they honed their practice of environmental “science” over thousands of years.

I realize getting all this into a painting of the type described above is quite impossible. However, this doesn’t mean that artists can’t try. Recently, I drove over to Highland Park to check out the Haramokngna Mural—Place Where People Gather, which was spearheaded by L.A. Commons on Figueroa Street across from Sycamore Grove Park. It is a very colorful mural that depicts the different people that have lived in the area over time. I am glad to report that it also includes historical references to the Tongva people, their tule-thatched homes and beautiful woven baskets filled with acorns.

In 2004, I did make it up to the 2,600-foot elevation of Tongva Peak in the Verdugo Hills. It was inspiring to be at a place that remembers the Tongva people in spirit—and from a vantage point where any hiker can scan for miles their ancestral home. So the other day, when I reviewed the painting of the Tongva people in the lobby of Eagle Rock City Hall, I felt a pang of disappointment that our modern culture can relegate 10,000 years of history into a minor footnote as a starting point of Eagle Rock history.