Transcript Document 7179619

Spanish California and the
Mission System
Questions
• What are the Motives for the establishment of
the Mission system, as opposed to the
Justifications?
• What are the components of the Mission System
and for what purposes did they function?
• What was the impact of the Mission System on
Indian Peoples?
• How did Indian peoples respond to the
conditions of the Mission System?
Identifications
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Master and Alternative Mission Narrative
Mission’s 10 year Plan
Francis Guest
Components of the Mission system
First Pueblos
Junipero Serra
Jayuntes and Monjeros
18th Century Perspectives of the system
Methods of Resistance
Chumash Revolt
Yuma Revolt
Population Decline
Mortality rates
Master Narrative
• Missions:
– Protected Indian’s from exploitation
– Relatively small original population
– Greatest population decline began at
Secularization in 1832
– Taught them European Skills
– Ensured a better and/or more consistent food
supply
• Teaching European style agriculture
• Introducing wheat, corn & domestic animals such
as cattle, sheep and horses
Master Narrative
• Myths
– Mission Indians were docile, passive
– Did not revolt
– Did not make war on the mendicant orders of
the civil authorities
– Especially in comparison to plains tribes
during American westward expansion
Alternative Narrative
• Introduced crops and animals provide less
food to populations
– Yields failed & animals died during drought
– Introduced diet: Less nutrients
– Milk: lactose intolerant
• Population
– Population equal to other areas that
depended on corn, beans and squash
– Population decline began with the Missions
Pre-contact Agriculture
• Corns, beans, squash were native crops,
not European
– Corn agriculture by California people Kumeyaay
– Trade and contact between California and
intensive irrigation agricultural Hohokam and
Puebloan cultures dates to at least 900AD
– Intensive Plant Husbandry, fishing & hunting
• Yucca, cacti, sedums, sages, sumacs, Manzanita,
oaks, pines, wild plums and grapes,
The Spanish Mission System
• Mission – the crux of Conquest
• Motives for Conquest
• Colonization
• Hispanic-ization
• Origin of the System
The Mission
• The Mission
– The Franciscans and
Other Mendicant
Orders
– Salvation in return for
labor
– Goals
• 10 yr plan
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Christianize
Self government
Secularize
Farmers
Mission San Diego de Alcala
est. 1769
Wards of the Friars
• Francis Guest
– As is commonly known, Spanish law made
the missionaries the legal guardians of
their Indian converts.
– In virtue of their conversion and baptism
the neophytes became the wards of the
friar
• Lands confiscated
• Neophytes became property of the friars
Components of the Mission
System
The Neophyte
Christians in
Training
Pueblo
Presidio
Rancho
Mission
Components of the Mission
System: the Pueblo
• The Pueblo
– Agricultural Towns
– Two Originally
Planned, Three
Eventually Built
– Indian Labor
– Hope to Decrease
Reliance on Mexico
and Missions
Viceroy Antonio de Bucareli
The First Pueblos
• San Jose de Guadalupe
• Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de
Rio de Porciuncula
• Villa de Branciforte (Santa Cruz)
Components of the Mission
System: the Pueblo
• Multiethnic Los Angeles, 1781
– 2 families: African-Mulatto (Caucasian-African
mix)
– 2 families: Indian-Indian
– 2 families: Mulatto-Mulatto
– 2 families: Spanish-Indian
– 1 family: Mulatto-Mestizo (Spanish-Indian mix)
– 1 family: Indian-Mulatto
– 1 family: Indian-Mestizo
The Settlers & “The Sacred”
expedition
• Direst of Poverty
• Government promise of support
• Change would offer some hope of improvement
Components of the Mission
System: the Presidio
The Presidio
• Forts to Protect the
Mission
• Garrisons Return
Fugitives
• Garrisons Capture
New Neophytes
• Four Built
• Weak Militarily
Presidio of Mission San Diego
Est. 1769
The Presidio
• Give Spanish
Limited Military
Control
• Unable to
Subsist without
the Missions
– Colonial
workforce - 1st
peoples
• Allow Control of
Coastal Native
People
Convict Lease system?
• Presidio labor forces
– Neophytes
• Mission fathers sometimes leased or
loaned Indian Laborers to the military
– If there was payment for services, the padres
were the recipients
Development and Growth
Father-President Serra
and His Legacy
Father-President
Fermin Francisco de
Lasuen
El Camino Real and 21
Missions of
California
Mission San Carlos Borromeo
Pueblos and Ranchos
Junipero Serra
• 1713 born on the Island of Majorca, Spain
– Educated at the Catholic University
– became a professor and librarian at the
Monastery
– Entered Franciscan order in 1730
– Sent to Mexico in 1749
– Back drop of the inquisition 15th – 19th Centuries
– Tribunals brought to Americas
» Originally functioned to obliterate Jewish and Moors
who could not prove their genuine conversion
» Functioned to destroy anyone sought to be a threat to
the institution, or Catholic ideals
1573 Spanish Inquisition
Legacy of Inquisition?
• Methods of repression continued by Totalitarian
Regimes & Police States
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Creation of racial & religious Ghettos
Forcible wearing of badges of shame
Formal state & religious propaganda
Spying
Seizure of property
Intimidation & torture
Sexual humiliation
Good cop/bad cop routine
Physical restraint
Separation of families
• No recognition of natural or civil rights
• Threat and repression of Humanity
Serra
• 1767 send to Lower California, established
9 missions in Upper California in coastal
areas
– Led invasion and foreign occupation of
California
– Father President
– Advisor to the civil and military authorities for
the missions and colonies
– Francisco Palou Biography of Serra describes
him as the “ruler of the province”
Fermin Francisco Lasuen
• Wrote in 1800 his justification for coercion
– It is evident that a nation which is
barbarous, ferocious, and ignorant
requires more frequent punishment than a
nation which is cultured, educated, and of
gentle and moderate customs
Components of the Mission
System: the Rancho
The Rancho
– Mission Herds
– Use Indian Labor
– Major Source of
Wealth in Mission
System
– Give Missions
Power over
Spanish
Government
San Diego & San Luis Rey
• Lacked sufficient agricultural lands to
support a congregated baptized population
– Majority lived in their own villages, fed
themselves, maintained their own crops
• Brought to the missions on Feast days and
as a rotating labor force
– Death rate exceeded birth rate under these
more favorable conditions compared to other
missions
Punishment
• Indian threw a stone at a missionary
– 25 lashes a day for 9 days
– 35 – 45 lashes each Sunday for 9 Sundays
• Soldier for Rape
– Soldier would receive 8 days of sentry duty
– Or
– 16 days on graveyard shift
San Diego Mission
• 1772 letter from Fr. Jayme
– Worried about several attempted rebellions
– Destruction of crops by soldiers
– Sexual violence perpetrated by soldiers
endemic
• 4 villages in which the soldiers rape and murder
• Evidence of 3 incidents of gang rape
• Blind women carried screaming and beaten into the
woods to be raped
– Neophytes believed the fathers could have stopped this
but allowed it to “keep the soldiers content”
Sexual Abuse
• Brutal attacks and Sexual violence previously
unknown to Tongva or others
– San Gabriel Mission - Tongva - Chasing, lassoing,
raping, beating, killing
– San Diego Mission - 3 Soldiers, 2 Kumeyaay girls,
gang raped and one murdered
• Sentenced to life as a California Citizen
– Santa Barbara - Chumash - rape, mutilation and
Murder
Santa Barbara Mission
• Conditions terrifying & restraints
unbearable
– Study by John Johnson
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67% children born at mission died before 5 yrs
75% died before puberty
Converts lived average of 12 years
60% population decrease
Measles, cholera, diphtheria,
SYPHYLIS introduced by Spanish soldiers
San Luis Rey Mission
• “Miserable Conditions”
• Failed escapes: flogged, iron clog fastened
to their legs
• Destruction of crops
• Famine
• General abuse
• Forced labor
San Diego Mission Revolt
• Revolt of November, 1772 Jayme killed
• Revolt of 1775 the Mission burned down
Forced System of Labor
• Excessive confining work
• Santa Barbara Mission:
– Fr. Maynard Geiger
– Brick Manufacture
• Men made adobe bricks
• Women aided in transporting bricks & tiles
– Weaving lucrative for the mission
• Women & Children employed in processing wool
and weaving
– Evidence of piece rate system, paid “in kind”
Physical Punishment
• General coercive nature of the system
• Padre Antonio de la Conception Horra,
1799
– The treatment shown to the Indian’s is the
most cruel I have ever read in history. For
the slightest things they receive heavy
floggings, are shackled, and put in the
stocks and treated with so much cruelty
that they are kept whole days without a
drink of water
Forced Conversion
• Captain Beechy, visited San Francisco
Bay, 1826 – 27
– If Indian’s refused to convert, they would
imprison them for days at a time releasing
them to walk around the mission until
they agreed to renounce the religion of
their forefathers
• Lt. Pear’s Journal, Hugo Reid’s Letters,
Cook, 1976
– Evidence of use of military coercion
Conditions of Women
• Unmarried girls, women and widows kept
in special compounds and locked in
dormitories at night.
– Separated from families and men
• Men kept in Jayuntes or men’s quarters
– Poor diet
– Poor hygiene at the missions
– Greater contagion
• Higher rate of death among women
Women’s Quarters: Monjero
• Russian Explorer Otto Van Kotzebue
• Santa Clarita Mission, 1824
– large quadrangular bldg without windows and only one
carefully secured door resembling a prison
– These dungeons are opened 2-3 x/day, but only to
allow the prisoners to pass to and from church
– I have occasionally seen the poor girls rush out
eagerly, to breathe fresh air, and driven immediately
into the church like a flock of sheep, by an old ragged
Spaniard armed with a stick. After mass they are
hurried back to their prison
18th C Perspectives
• French Explorer Jean Francois Galaup
Comte de La Perouse
– Likened the Indians of Mission San Carlos in
1786 to the Slaves of Santo Domingo
• Descriptions lf serious charges of cruelty
– George Vancouver Expeditions
– Naturalist Archibald Menzies, 1792
– Documents & letters authored by military
authorities in 1785 & cited by George
Bancroft
Native Resistance
“Cooperation”
Passive Resistance
Fugitivism
Active Resistance
Revolt
Homicide
Raids on livestock
Revitalization
“Cooperation”
• Only if there was something to gain, material
benefits, or too much to lose in resisting
Passive Resistance
• Non cooperation
• Work Slow Down
• Destruction of Tools and Resistance
Fugitivism
• “Huntin’ ‘em up!”
• 12 lashes after Sunday Mass, then kiss hand of
missionary
• “I don’t want it, I am returning to my land”
• Pagan Headmen caught for harboring fugitives
– Kept confined for one month
– Whipped
– killed
Revitalization Movements
• Chumash - Santa Barbara
– Chupu - Earth Goddess & “tears of the sun”
• Split between “Traditional” & conversos or
neophytes
Mission San Gabriel Revolt
• Revolts & resistance so common as to
not be recorded regularly
– 1785 revolt against Mission San Gabriel
• Led by Taypurina, 24 yrs woman shaman
• 4 people received 20 lashes, 2 released
• General Ugarte orders 2 years later
» Condemned Nicolai to six yrs of work at the
presidio followed by perpetual exile
» 2 other women dismissed with 2 years
imprisonment
Chumash Revolt
February 21, 1824
• No way out of Mission except escape
– Catalyst for revolt, flogging so severe a young
neophyte died of wounds at Santa Ynez
Mission
– Building burned
• La Purisima Mission of Lompoc
• Santa Barbara Mission
San Rafael Mission Revolt
• Pomponio (Coast Miwuk)
– originally from Mission Dolores in San
Francisco
• 1821 – 1824
• He led guerilla warfare between San
Rafael and Santa Cruz missions
Resistance
Uprisings between 1820 – 1830s of
Missions in San Francisco Bay Area
Leaders of Revolts
 Yozcolo
 Captured, beheaded, head hung on a pole for all
to see
 Estanislao
 Marin
 Quintin
Yuma & San Diego Revolts
San Diego - 1769 Father Jayme
Yuma Revolt - 1780 - Most Successful
Destroyed 2 missions and the settlements
30 soldiers
4 padres
Cut off Travel over Anza trail until 1820s
Impact of the Mission System
and Spanish Settlement
Land
Population
Culture
Mission Santa Barbara
Population Decline
• 65 years from 1769 – 1834
– 81,000 baptized
– 60,000 deaths
• 1834 15,000 resident neophytes remained at 21
missions
• 50% - 70% decline during mission period
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Rape and Murder - abortion, infanticide
Military & Mission physical torture and abuse
Forced labor
Malnutrition, starvation
disease
Social Upheaval
• Murder of Knowledge Specialists
• New economic system -destruction and dispossession
• Ideas imposed that forced restructuring of social and
political relationships
– Gente de Razon/Gente de Sin
– Patriarchy