Archaeology, Indigenous erasure, and the creation of white public space at the California missions

This paper explores how the materiality of the past has been mobilized to simultaneously erase Indigenous presence and create white public space at Spanish mission sites in California. As the site of present-day Santa Clara University, Mission Santa Clara de Asís presents an important case study. The documentary record associated with more than a century of archaeology at the mission reveals its intersections with heritage-making, particularly the maintenance of public memory that privileges and valorizes whiteness. These same records further detail how the university and local residents effectively erased the heritage of the thousands of Ohlone people and members of neighboring Indigenous groups who lived, worked, and died at Mission Santa Clara. Recognizing how archaeology has contributed to the current heritage landscape at Santa Clara and other California mission sites is a necessary first step in the creation of new archaeological and heritage practices that center the experiences and persistence of Native Californian communities.

Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.

The California Missions

Initiated in San Diego in 1769 by the Mallorcan missionary Junípero Serra, the California missions eventually numbered twenty-one and spanned coastal California from San Diego to the San Francisco Bay Area. Spanish officials viewed the missions as necessary anachronisms, founded as they were long after the Crown had closed down most missions in New Spain. But missions were useful to the Crown in California because missionaries were inexpensive and zealous in their devotion to turning indigenous frontier peoples into loyal Catholics and taxpaying citizens. Furthermore, they often came to settle regions that Spanish settlers had no interest in colonizing. Missionaries came to California with tried and true techniques of recruitment as well as military and biological allies in the form of germs, plants, and animals. Thus into the California missions, in small groups over decades, came tens of thousands of Native Americans, many driven into the Franciscans’ arms by European-introduced diseases that undermined village life and by environmental changes that accompanied Spanish colonization and undercut Native subsistence practices. In the missions, Indigenous labor and productivity became the backbone of the colonial region and a source of enduring controversy. Some baptized Natives would learn European trades and the rudiments of Catholicism and the Spanish language, but disease shortened the lives of most. From their early days the missions prompted Indigenous resistance and invited criticism from European visitors and Spanish bureaucrats who saw them as relics of a bygone era during which Native labor was controlled by padres. By the time the Mexican government secularized the missions in the 1830s and parceled out the missions’ lands and resources among well-connected colonists and a small number of Natives, the missions had proven themselves to be potent and deadly agents of change. Despite the heavy toll that they exacted on Native life and culture, the literature on the California missions—with a few notable exceptions—remained laudatory through the middle of the 20th century, written as it was by boosters and hagiographers. Since the 1980s, however, a growing body of work has documented the degree to which the missions upended Native lives and communities. Increasingly, and largely in response to the Catholic Church’s decades-long campaign to canonize Serra that culminated in 2015, this new work has examined in depth the ways in which Natives maintained their culture and survived the challenges of mission life and Spanish colonialism. The most recent studies of the missions combine insights from archaeology, anthropology, and history; a deep reading of documents in the archives of Mexico and across California; and a mining of the mission registers created by the Franciscans. The result is a vivid, harrowing, data-driven, polyvocal rendering of the California missions. This new work transcends both earlier triumphalist accounts depicting Franciscan missionaries as gentle and homogenous padres who brought the glories of European civilization to backwards peoples and censorious indictments of those padres as all-powerful colonists who destroyed all that was good in Native culture.

“If They Do Not Fulfill What They Have Promised, I Will Accuse Them”: Locating Indigenous Women and Their Influence in the California Missions

In Indigenous California, women often held important roles of political and spiritual leadership. Spanish Franciscan colonialism imposed a patriarchal framework through the California missions. Through a close look of the lives of two Indigenous women who lived at Mission Santa Cruz, this article examines how Native women maintained power and influence within the mission communities. The stories of these two women, Yaquenonsat and Yuñan, intersect with difficult issues of rape and sexual violence, infanticide, sterility, abortion, and the impact of sexually transmitted disease. And yet, the article focuses on resistance and expressions of power—the two women played key roles in organizing and planning the assassination of the abusive Padre Quintana in 1812. This article proposes new methodological approaches to the chancery archives to trace the lives of these women and suggests new ways of analyzing stories of individuals and families within the missions to find the subtle ways of resistance and rebellion by Indigenous men and women.

Dialogues

The California missions, whose original church spaces and visual programs were produced by Iberian, Mexican, and Native artisans between 1769 and 1823, occupy an ambiguous chronological, geographical, and political space. They occupy lands that have pertained to conflicting territorialities: from Native nations, to New Spain, to Mexico, to the modern multicultural California. The physical and visual landscapes of the missions have been sites of complex and often incongruous religious experiences; historical trauma and romantic vision; Indigenous genocide, exploitation, resistance, and survivance; state building and global enterprise. This Dialogues section brings together critical voices, including especially the voices of California Indian scholars, to interrogate received models for thinking about the art historical legacies of the California missions. Together, the contributing authors move beyond and across borders and promote new decolonial strategies that strive to be responsive to the experience of California Indian communities and nations. This conversation emerges from cross-disciplinary relationships established at a two-day conference, “‘American’ Art and the Legacy of Conquest: Art at California’s Missions in the Global 18th–20th Centuries,” sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art and held at the University of California, Los Angeles, in November 2019.

The California Missions: Public Attitudes Toward Perceived Authenticity, Sacredness, and Uses of Historic Religious Sites

Psychological research can be used to understand people’s perceptions and attitudes toward historic environments. Understanding the public’s attitudes toward historic sites can help to improve decisions about the preservation and management of these places. This paper reviews a series of studies examining three historic Catholic Missions in central California: Missions San Miguel, San Luis Obispo, and La Purisima. These missions have very different histories and uses. Mission San Miguel is one of the best preserved of the California Missions; however, its fragility limits use of the Mission by its parish. Mission San Luis Obispo has been substantially rebuilt over the years; it has an active parish and is a focal point for tourism in the city. Mission La Purisima was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1800s and rebuilt as a WPA project in the 1930s. It is currently a state historic park located in a rural setting. The research on these missions examined perceptions of authenticity and sacredness of the places. These perceptions were linked to attitudes about appropriate uses of the missions (for example, the appropriateness of tourism) and how the missions should be managed.

Left Coast Catholicism: The Tradition of Dissent in the California Church

This chapter argues that independence, innovation, bold action, and openness to change—traditions uniquely nurtured in California from its beginnings—shaped Catholic experience in the Golden State. It presents a treatment of the formative California missions that focuses on the “first dissenter,” Fray José Maria Fernandez, a critic of the exploitation of Indians in the late 1790s who was persecuted by enemies (and later by many historians) as mad or brain-damaged, yet endured in his advocacy work. In the twentieth century, California Catholics engaged issues of great importance for the whole church; the local church engaged in vigorous dialogue that addressed questions of work and social justice with a directness and intensity rarely witnessed in eastern cities, where ethnic tribalism so often undermined concerted action, especially action that called the church to account for failures to practice its own social teachings.