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The Gabrielino Indian confronted the developer.
"We are the Gabrielino Indians. This is our territory, in our hearts and minds," Vera Rocha told Tim Cantwell earlier this month when she and a half-dozen other activists staged a surprise visit to the magnificent 220-acre chunk of the San Gabriel Mountain foothills that Cantwell wants to develop.
Cantwell, 36, looked somewhat puzzled as Rocha spoke. She told him how three weeks earlier John Hafner, an Occidental College biology professor who lives on property next to Cantwell's, had discovered an ancient Indian grinding stone while digging an irrigation line.
That's interesting, Cantwell told her. But he said a survey by an expert he hired last year concluded that there was nothing archeologically significant about the land where the two were standing. In the past three years Cantwell and his partners have spent $10 million in acquiring and planning a residential community for the property.
"It might not be significant to you. But it is to us," said Rocha, 60, who lives in Baldwin Park and had come that day at the request of Altadena residents worried about the proposed development.
As Rocha continued, she invoked her ancestors, Mother Earth and the sanctity of the land, which for most of this century was home to a tuberculosis sanatorium known as La Vina and named for the vineyards once there.
These close encounters of an uncomfortable kind have been occurring for more than two years as developers and neighbors try to reconcile their differences.
On Sept. 14 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to hold a hearing on whether to grant zone changes that would allow residential housing. The proposal calls for 270 single-family homes nestled around indigenous live oaks and the deep canyons of the surrounding Angeles National Forest.
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