By Emma Rault, Columnist
Just off a parking lot on the Cal State Long Beach campus, two willow poles bent into an arch are a portal to a different world. A dirt path snakes through waist-high white and purple flowers to a clearing sheltered by oak and eucalyptus trees.
This is Puvungna, an active ceremonial site, ancient village and sacred place that holds great significance for the Tongva and Acjachemen — the two tribal nations Indigenous to LA and Orange County — as well as several other nations in Southern California.
“It’s our creation site,” explained Rebecca Robles, an Acjachemen tribal elder and retired nurse who grew up in Long Beach. “Two of our deities came to us here: Wiyot, the creator, and Chinigchinich, the lawgiver. This is where we changed from spiritual beings to having a physical form.”
But despite its cultural and archaeological importance — which has been recognized by the National Register of Historic Places and California’s Native American Heritage Commission — the university has repeatedly harmed and endangered the site.
In the early 1990s, Cal State Long Beach planned to build a strip mall there. Native activists and allies camped on the land to protect it. When the university came in to bulldoze a beloved community garden that had been created on Earth Day in 1970, one part-time instructor chained herself to a fence, got arrested and lost her job over it.
Decades later, the fight to protect Puvungna continues. CSULB is more than two years behind on its legal obligation to appoint a long-term caretaker for the sacred land.
The strip-mall project in the ’90s led to two lawsuits, one filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which said the university was violating the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. The university spent over $2.3 million in public funds on the lawsuits before finally abandoning its development plans.
Then, in 2019, CSULB dumped more than 6,000 cubic yards of construction soil and debris onto the Puvungna meadow. Numerous trucks rolled onto the site, damaging cultural and archaeological heritage and possibly disturbing ancestral remains.
That same year, Juaneño Band of Mission Indians, Acjachemen Nation-Belardes — one of three Acjachemen groups — partnered with the California Cultural Resources Preservation Alliance (CCRPA) to sue the university for violating the California Environmental Quality Act. The Native American Heritage Commission also joined the suit.
In 2021, that lawsuit led to the 22-acre meadow on the CSULB campus — the remaining undeveloped portion of a site once that once spanned 500 acres — being placed under a “restrictive covenant” preventing future construction, and a settlement requiring the university to “make a good faith effort” to appoint a caretaker within two years.
Over a 10-month period, the lawsuit’s petitioners and their attorneys worked closely with the university to develop a request for proposal (RFP), which was finally issued in April 2024.
Friends of Puvungna — a nonprofit spearheaded by Robles — then submitted an application in partnership with the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, a Tongva-led organization.
It was the only application the university received, and it seemed like an obvious fit. Friends of Puvungna was already doing much of this work informally, hosting volunteer cleanups, ceremonies, food distributions, poetry readings and other gatherings. Becoming the official conservator would safeguard the site in perpetuity and allow the organization to undertake proper restoration of the land, which is plagued by invasive plant species and pollution from the soil dumping.
After decades of grassroots organizing, it seemed like at last victory was close.
A month later, the university rejected the application, backtracking on its own request for proposals. The university said it had failed to properly outline requirements regarding applicants’ prior experience, conflicts of interest, and funding required for the site. The university also said the RFP “failed to generate an adequate number of proposals.”
Sarah Lucey, an attorney with Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger who represents the tribe and CCRPA, was baffled. “We had taken so long to draft the RFP, and now they were saying, basically, in hindsight, the RFP wasn’t good enough.”
Ever since, the situation has been in limbo. Communication with the university has stalled, said Patricia Martz, president of CCRPA, the preservation alliance involved in the lawsuit.
Chris Reese, associate vice president of university relations, told Random Lengths News that “a funding source [needs] to be identified before another RFP is issued.”
However, the university is already spending money on Puvungna. The RFP states that “CSULB’s current annual cost to maintain the Property is approximately $60k.”
In 2023, Robles says the university spent around $1 million on a soil treatment plan that tribal members urged the university to delay until a caretaker was appointed.
Sarah Lucey doesn’t understand the university’s stance on funding. “If there’s already money earmarked for the maintenance of Puvungna, why can’t you [appoint a caretaker] now?” In the meantime, the university could continue its search for long-term external funding — such as an endowment — to eventually replace the $60k, while the caretaker could fund anything above that sum.
In response to a query about the budget currently allocated for Puvungna, CSULB’s Chris Reese told Random Lengths that “There are many factors [sic] affecting maintenance costs to address those questions with specificity.”
For Robles, at times the stalemate feels like “a continuation of disregard for Native Americans, Native history, and a continuation of injustice towards us.”
“What really kind of amazes me,” Martz said, “is that the university has so little appreciation for [Puvungna]. I would think they’d be proud of having a sacred site on their campus, but instead they look at it as a liability.”
Martz hopes the arrival of new CSULB president Dr. Loren J. Blanchard on May 1 might bring change.
“It has the potential to have a world-class Native American garden, be a living museum, a center for teaching,” Robles said. “We’re carrying a vision of healing that will benefit many people.”
CSULB has a thriving American Indian Studies program and the annual powwow on campus uses the Puvungna name — yet the site itself is not even marked on campus maps.
Gathering places like Puvungna are particularly important because most of the coastal tribes in California don’t have their own land base. A number of treaties signed in 1851-1852 were supposed to guarantee reservation lands, but those treaties were never ratified by Congress and were hidden under an injunction of secrecy for more than 50 years. Today, reservations make up less than 1% of the state.
Recent years have seen growing efforts to restore tribal ownership and stewardship of ancestral homelands — a movement known as Land Back. In 2022, California State University Chico returned 93 acres to the Mechoopda people. Cal State Long Beach has the opportunity to be the next CSU to take reparative action.
For the people advocating for Puvungna, it’s been a long and hard fight. But at a talking circle hosted last month by Friends of Puvungna and a collective of students from the Master of Social Work program, CSULB student Ian Johnson aptly summed up why this work is so important.
“We aren’t just fighting for organizations or against construction,” he said. “We’re fighting for a way of being together.”