Earlier this month, during a campaign rally in Nebraska, Donald Trump said that losing Los Angeles in a potential attack from Iran would be “a small price to pay.” To many Californians, the idea that a president would write off a city of millions sounded unthinkable. To the Tongva, the indigenous people of the Los Angeles Basin, it sounded familiar.
Tongva displacement began with Spanish settlement in the 1770s, and was codified in the 1840s and 50s when the U.S. acquired California and failed to ratify 18 different treaties that promised reservation lands, livestock and education. But if California Indian treaties were rendered purposeless, Trump’s words aren’t so random. “There is debate on what Trump meant when he said Iran can take out Los Angeles and San Diego and as in all his . . . speeches, it becomes the listeners’ responsibility to decipher truth from lies,” Tongva tribal elder Tina Calderon told Salon. “But I believe calling out two cities that he heavily targeted with ICE and who are against his attacks on [the] environment and Peoples was quite intentional.”
