Located in the mountainous southern end of the Los Angeles Basin, the Black Star Canyon village (CA-ORA-132) is famously known as the location of the 1832 “Battle of Black Star Canyon”. The battle was originally authorized by colonial authorities as a reprisal for horse theft by the village occupants, and resulted in a lopsided ambush and massacre of the indigenous inhabitants. The village was memorialized by the state as an official California Historical Landmark (#217) in 1935, and is recognized as the only skirmish between indigenous peoples, Mexican and American colonists in Orange County. After the 1935 landmark designation, the battle event was annually republished as a “massacre” in Los Angeles and Orange County newspapers, while the village underwent multiple archaeological excavations during the 1930s and 50s. The archaeological collections produced from said projects were never analyzed or published. At present, the massacre account dominates canyon folklore and local public imaginations, which is characterized by a “negative heritage” concerned with the disappearance of indigenous people. Here, the development of this negative heritage is outlined, then contested by archaeological research focused on understanding the autonomy exercised by the village occupants.

Nathan Acebo is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Stanford University Anthropology Department and the recipient of the 2017 Charles E. Rozaire Award for Student Research in California Archaeology. He received his B.S. in Anthropology with an emphasis on cultural resource management at Cal Poly Pomona, and has participated in various colonial/prehistoric archaeological and ethnographic research and CRM projects on the Mojave Desert, southern Channel Islands, and San Francisco Bay Area.