Playa Vista's Native American burial ground

Rest without peace. That's the case for at least 411 Native American remains that have been pulled from the earth beneath a major Playa Vista Development. CityBeat had the cover story this past week:

Robert Dorame is waiting for his call. Or a letter, or any indication that the company behind the 1,087-acre Playa Vista development, Playa Capital Co., LLC, is going to let him get on with his work. He just wants what anyone would want for his family, and the responsibility is weighing more and more heavily on his shoulders. For years, now, he has been getting calls from other Native Americans, wondering just what the hell is going on over there.

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The Native American graves and artifacts on Playa Vista have always been a concern. Playa Vista and its can-do president, Steve Soboroff, had a plan in place since 1991 (renewed in 2001) that would govern how to deal with these “archeological sites.” Archeologists have known for decades about the many village sites along the Westchester bluffs, which had been inhabited for between 5,000 and 7,000 years. The various incarnations of the Gabrielino Tongva tribe, of course, knew full well. Some of them had buried ancestors there as recently as the 1960s.

Nobody, however, was prepared for what has come out of the ground at Playa Vista. Or that the remains would be held in limbo for so long.

To date, 411 sets of Native American remains have been unearthed during the construction of Playa Vista, most of them from one small plot at the base of the bluffs, down below the Loyola Marymount campus. This represents, archeologists say, one of the largest known Native American burial grounds in Southern California, and one of the biggest in North America. The remains have been, as Dorame has testified, “ripped from the earth,” deposited in numbered boxes, and stored in a trailer on the development site. Some of them have been there for three or four years.