In September 1996, for the first time in over two hundred years, the Tongva community launched a Southern California Indian sewn plank canoe (ti’at) into the channel waters off Santa Catalina Island. A crew of five paddlers guided the vessel, named Mo’omat Ahiko (Breath of the Ocean), twelve miles along the rugged coastline of the sacred island known to them as Pimu.

The Tongva community’s effort to revitalize its maritime traditions emerges from a nightmarish history. Since the Spanish colonization of California, the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin and the southern Channel Islands have experienced severe depopulation, loss of land, and cultural fragmentation. In this context, plank canoes (ti’atem) serve not only as distinctive markers of identity but also represent renewed connections to the ocean and the ancestors.  

Not long after Cindi Alvitre had dreamt of an awakening warrior and tia’tem filled with homeward-bound Tongva peoples, she was contacted by kayak expert Jim Noyes who offered to fund the creation of Mo’omat Ahiko.  Peter Howorth, a boat builder familiar with Chumash canoe (tomol) design, soon joined the effort to rejuvenate a nearly vanished tradition. Two previously existing Chumash vessels served as models: the tomol constructed by Fernando Librado in 1912 and the Helek (Hawk) constructed in 1976, both now housed in the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

Following the appearance in 1996 of the ti’at Mo’omat Ahiko and its counterpart tomol named ‘Elye’wun (Swordfish) in 1997, the Tongva and Chumash have enjoyed a renaissance of their traditional ocean-faring culture that places the vessels at the center of communal gatherings and ritual activities including “village hops” where the canoes are paddled to important cultural sites along the coast, and annually across the channel.   

Photographers Frank Magallanes and Althea Edwards began charting the renewal of Southern California Native maritime navigation in 1996. Selected from a larger series of photographs of the Tongva and Chumash plank-canoes, the images here highlight the role of Mo’omat Ahiko in Tongva cultural perseverance and community engagement. 

We invite you to look not only here but beyond as this dream continues on, within and all around us, propelled by many more hands and through future generations…

Text and images from the 2011 exhibit “Launching A Dream: Reviving Tongva Maritime Traditions” at the Fowler Museum, UCLA. Curated by Dr. Wendy Teeter and Cindi Alvitre.