About this Piece

One of the recurrent themes through The Great Wall of Los Angeles is that of California’s Indigenous history, illustrating stories of the Fernandeño Tataviam, Gabrielino‐Tongva, and Barbareño/Ventureño‐Chumash, whose ancestral homelands encompass much of (and much beyond) what we consider modern‐day Los Angeles. Many of the panels illustrate the colonization of those ancestral territories, forced assimilation, and enslavement as the lands and ways of life of these people were violently taken and reshaped.

The story of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas is one that powerfully encompasses many of these narratives. A member of the Nicoleño tribe, the “lone woman” lived on San Nicolas Island for 18 years in isolation after the removal of her people to the mainland. Little is known about her with certainty, but the most common retelling of her story describes her living entirely alone on the island for 18 years, from 1835 to 1853. When eventually she was taken to the mainland—Santa Barbara—she found that no one understood her or her language. Her name, her people, and the island world she knew had vanished, lost to violence, greed, and the inexorable tides of a changing world. One powerful remnant of her story remains: an archival recording of a song that she taught to a Chumash man in the three weeks she survived on the mainland.

This piece centers on that song. Beginning in a group of cellos, the song appears, is lost to a wall of orchestral chaos, and then reappears in a single, determined voice. Though vanishing eventually into a wall of quiet noise, the tendrils and echoes of what she sang carry through into the silence.

—Juhi Bansal