 Although a California Senate Bill of 2008 asserts that the US government signed treaties with the Tongva, promising of land for reservations, and that these treaties were never ratified, a paper published in 1972 by Robert Heizer of the University of California at Berkeley, shows that the eighteen treaties made between April 29, 1851, and August 22, 1852 were negotiated with persons who were not representing any actual "tribes", and that none of these persons had authority to cede lands that belonged to the Indians.By the turn of the 20th century, the Island Tongva had disappeared and the mainland communities were also nearing extinction.The endonym "Tongva" was recorded by American ethnographer C. Hart Merriam in 1903 and has been widely adopted by scholars and descendants.