After Saint Serra: Unearthing indigenous histories at the California missions

Abstract

In 2015, Pope Francis elevated Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra to sainthood, reinforcing the association between the California missions and the founding of Euroamerican colonies in western North America. Yet the canonization also leaves this discourse, and its associated narrative of indigenous decline, open to critique. Here, I examine two developments that effectively recast the California missions as distinctly indigenous places that embody both struggle and perseverance. First, Serra's canonization offers a platform for Native Californians to raise concerns about the historical and continuing impacts of the mission system. Second, the canonization coincides with new archaeological and ethnohistorical investigations of indigenous life in colonial California that illuminate how native people persisted despite the challenges of missionization. Taken together, these developments intersect ongoing efforts to reorient public interpretive programs at California mission sites to show their complex indigenous histories and the enduring consequences missionization has had for indigenous communities today.

Cultural Keystone Places and the Chumash Landscapes of Kumqaq’, Point Conception, California

“…The Chumash ties to the Kumqaq’ region are woven into the shell middens and lithic scatters of the past 9,000 years or more through the villages of the mssion era and into present-day communities. The broader landscapes of Kumqaq’ offer a testament to Chumash persistence and renewal over roughly 10,000 years, a story that is key to the persistence of other California tribes and Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas and beyond (Lightfoot, Panich, et al 2013; Panich 2016; Schneider 2015).…”

Fighting erasure and dispossession in the San Francisco Bay Area: putting archaeology to work for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe

“…Yet, Native Californians fought hard to maintain their communities and their connections to their ancestral territories, often in ways that are ignored in traditional historical narratives (Panich and Schneider, 2014;Hull and Douglass, 2018). In public interpretations of mission sites, however, this tension between struggle and persistence is often overshadowed by public memory that celebrates the European origins of the missions while largely overlooking the experiences of Native Californians (Dartt-Newton, 2011;Kryder-Reid, 2016;Panich, 2016Panich, , 2022. At Mission Santa Clara-on the campus of Santa Clara University (SCU)-tribal members have been working with archaeologists and other scholars to reclaim Native heritage.…”

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

“…Native Californians largely see the missions as places of profound misery, and they have long critiqued the central role of whitewashed mission history in California’s heritage discourse (Castillo, 1989; Costo and Costo, 1987; Dartt-Newton, 2011; Galvan and Medina, 2018; Miranda, 2013; Ramirez and Lopez, 2020; Schneider et al, 2019, 2020). Broader public reckoning with the heritage of the California missions paralleled the process of canonization for 18th-century missionary Junípero Serra, coming to a head in 2015 when he was elevated to sainthood (Panich, 2016). More recently, mission sites again became lightning rods for protests against racial injustice following the murders of George Floyd and other Black Americans in 2020.…”