During colonization, the Spanish referred to these people as Gabrieleño and Fernandeño, names derived from the Spanish missions built on their land: Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and Mission San Fernando Rey de España. In the precolonial era, the people lived in as many as 100 villages and primarily identified by their village rather than by a pan-tribal name. The Tongva ( / ˈ t ɒ ŋ v ə/ TONG-və) are an Indigenous people of California from the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands, an area covering approximately 4,000 square miles (10,000 km 2).
Hart Merriam, she was cited as the source of the widely used endonym Tongva. Narcisa Higuera, photographed in 1905, was one of the last fluent Tongva speakers.
