UCLA

A broad examination of settler colonial hegemony of the City of Los Angeles and its municipal water institution the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is employed to understand the impacts of erasure for two tribal communities; the Tongva who are the original people of the LA Basin and the Owens Valley Paiute (N��m�) who are impacted by the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The paths of each tribe are different in terms of federal recognition and water rights claims but there are notable similarities in dispossession enacted by the City of LA that in turn have produced unique tribally led counter hegemonic movements to insert native history and assert tribal sovereignty to protect their ancestral water. A critical reading of histories written about LA is presented to examine hegemonic forces propagated by the City of LA in the production of narratives and rhetoric that erase Native American history, thus minimizing the ability of Native peoples to be heard in discussions of water within the city today.