This is not an era in California history that I own just yet. In my regular US History surveys, I talk about the natives briefly in the pre-Columbian era, and I don't really get back to California until American trading and whaling ships arrive in the early 19th century, after Mexico became independent from Spain, to find not just Spanish-speaking people but Russian fur traders as well. So this week I had to teach myself some of this material, and it's all pretty routine until you find stuff unexplained that appears to be obvious. Plus, whatever I DO know about this period is from a book Carey McWilliams published in 1946 that's about southern California and JUST southern California, and his contention is that this period, at least in southern California, was replaced by a constructed version of the Spanish past almost before the last Californio had been laid to rest. I didn't get to work that out until the second class session, so here's an overview, and here's what I learned when I started to investigate the Mission system instituted by the Spanish in California starting in 1768.
Follow me below the frybread of the Lummi nation for my take on all this.
I've set the course up so that on Monday we read the book that's serving as a textbook:
and on Wednesday we read something that goes beyond it and provides a platform for discussion. This week, it was from this book:
I'll get to the Spanish Fantasy Past as soon as I explain how a tremendously erroneous view of California entered the world of maps for about 200 years after it was found to be untrue. Here's the map:
and here's the voyage Hernando Cortez took in 1535 (on a map that has his journey from Spain on it too).
THAT's the idea that was sent back to Europe, never mind the fact that Francesco de Ulloa became the first European to see the mouth of the Colorado River four years later. I think a lot of the California-as-island maps were sent out with the knowledge it wasn't true. Incidentally, Ulloa. We're going to become familiar with a lot of the names on the street map of San Francisco over the next couple of weeks.
The Monday lesson gets interesting for us in 1768, when the governor of Alta California, Jose Galvez, Gaspar de Portola and Father Junipero Serra set off on an expedition to establish mission communities from the Mexican border north, and here's a map with the 21 missions that Serra and the Franciscans established between 1768 and 1823.
It's sometimes easier to put up a map and riff on it.
So by 1786 there were 10 missions, 9 of which had been established either by Father Serra himself or his associates. Californians study this in the fourth grade and then they never think about it again unless they take a course like this. So I led into it with this, from a collection of first-person narratives about Early California at the Library of Congress:
It is little wonder that there are no known book-length first-person narratives by California Native Americans for this period: none of these indigenous groups had a written language before the introduction of European culture, and many of the clans and family groups were wiped out so quickly that there was no chance for a record to be made of their experience.
It has been difficult to get the native perspective on the establishment of the Missions for all the usual reasons that go with colonization in North America: no written language and most of them had died of European diseases.
And this is where McWilliams comes in.This is from Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946), from the beginning of a chapter called "The Indian in the Closet:"
A land of magical improvisation,Southern California has created its own past. - snip - The symbols of this synthetic past are three in number: the Franciscan padre praying at sundown in the Mission garden, lovely Ramona and brave Alessandro fleeing through the foothills of Mt. San Jacinto, and the Old Spanish Don sunning himself in the courtyard of his rancho. Around these sacred symbols, the legends have grown. According to the authorized version, the officially approved script, the Indians were devoted to the Franciscan, and, with the collapse of the Mission system, lost their true friends and devoted defenders. - snip - The other side of the legend has to do with the idyllic period "before the gringos" came, when the Spanish residents of Alta California, all members of one big happy guitar-twanging family, danced the fandango and lived out days of beautiful indolence in lands of the sun that expand the soul.
The Indian background? Somehow it got lost. Actually, erased when the commercial value of the Mission tradition became apparent in the late 1880s. And, in fact, lovely Ramona and Brave Alessandro are characters in a book,
Ramona, written by Helen Hunt Jackson in 1884. Ms. Jackson wanted to do for the California Indians what Harriet Beecher Stowe did for the African slaves in
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
There's a pageant now, out in Hemet in the desert past Palm Springs. It's been there since 1923.
And then, from a study an honors class at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo did of the options available to fourth grade teachers when they teach the Mission system,
A Sacramento Bee article, "Push to Teach Indians' Heritage In State" by Kevin Yamamura, stated problems educators currently have with the curriculum concerning Indian Culture. "In California, I think the perception is that Indians are living in teepees, riding horses and shooting bows and arrows," commented Bobby Barrent, the vice chairman of the Viejas Band of Kymeyaay Indians in San Diego. Most Californians get this perception in the fourth grade, when students get taught about California Missions. Senator Dede Alpert explained why the stereotype exists, "It is not that the teachers want to teach the wrong info, it's just that they don't have the material to teach the right info."
So what WAS the experience the Indians had of the Mission System? It's remarkably difficult to estimate how many Natives there were in California before European contact; the estimates range from 130,000 to 310,000 in 1769. We do know, however, that in 1832, California had 57,000 Indians, and the decline was not entirely due to European diseases. McWilliams, in fact, writing in 1946, said this:
With the best theological intentions in the world, the Franciscan padres eliminated Indians with the effectiveness of Nazis operating concentration camps.
Okay. And it was only the Mission Indians who were dying. The Indians who didn't come into the missions to be converted had a much higher survival rate.
But there have been attempts to whitewash it, or to at least find other ways of explaining these issues, and I found two interesting case studies. First, there 's the matter of the possible sainthood of Junipero Serra. Here's the statue of him in the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.
I think that's Mission Santa Barbara he's holding but I could be wrong about that. As you know, each state has two representatives in Statuary Hall, and we'll discuss the other representative of California when we get to the Civil War.
About Serra. KCET, one of the public television stations in Los Angeles has an article about Serra in their LA as Subject files at their website, and it has this to say about Serra and the Mission project:
Regarded as the founding father of California's mission system, Serra has long been admired within the state. John Steven McGroarty painted him as a saintly figure in "The Mission Play," and in 1988 Pope John Paul II beatified Serra, bringing the Franciscan father one step away from actual sainthood. But while Serra is celebrated for converting both Indians into Christians and California into a European possession, scholarship--informed by a fresh look at administrative records, correspondence, and other archived documents from California's colonial era--over the past few decades has come to view Serra's mission-building project as a disaster for the state's native inhabitants.
There was a HUGE fact-finding effort in support of Serra's candidacy for sainthood during the 1940s, but knowledge of how the missions treated their neophytes was suppressed in the material sent to the Vatican to promote the beatification and eventual canonization of Father Serra in 1949, and when in 1985 Indians reacted angrily to the news Serra was going to be beatified, the historians who were asked by the Church to participate in Serra's defense (none of whom had ever been critical of Serra) were asked leading and often open ended questions and none of them brought up the corporal punishment that was often used at the Missions, despite all the evidence that this was true. At this writing, Serra is waiting for one more miracle to be verified.
The other case study was published in a 2006 issue of the American Indian Quarterly and it's about the Chumash people, whose homeland is roughly San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties (roughly the 24th Congressional District), and their encounter with the five missions that were built in their homeland between 1786 and 1804. The authors, Deana Dartt-Newton and Jon M. Erlandson, make this observation in the introduction to their article:
Another anthropological approach is to explain postcontact changes in Native Californian societies as responses to something other than colonial oppression, especially droughts or cyclical resource shortages caused by overpopulation, overexploitation of resources [in this case Spanish cattle eating the food sources of the Chumash]. or environmental fluctuations. In such ecological scenarios, California Indians who moved to the Spanish missions made "optimal" or "risk-minimization" choices primarily to avoid problems associated with harsh or unstable climatic conditions. As a result, primary blame for the consequences of such choices is deflected away from Franciscan fathers, Spanish soldiers, and European colonialism and toward the vagaries of nature.
The rest of the article is a takedown of an article that does exactly that. The authors conclude that there were no other responses and that Spanish colonialism is the primary cause of the cultural changes that affected the Chumash at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, during which time the Chumash population declined by 67%.
Next week, Mexican California, and, I suspect, a discussion of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican war. It's a fascinating document.
Sources: Aside from the three books mentioned, you'll need access to a library with good databases for the two articles I used for this: James A. Sandos, "Junipero Serra's Canonization and the Historical Record," American Historical Review (2001): 1253-1269; and Deana Dartt-Newton and Jon M. Erlandson, "Little Choice for the Chumash: Colonialism, Cattle and Coercion in Mission Period California," American Indian Quarterly Summer & Fall 2006, 416-430.