California Indian Reactions to the Franciscans

Abstract

The entrance of the Spanish into California and the founding of the Franciscan mission system has been described in many books both by those sympathetic apologists for the missions and the Spanish as bringing “civilization” to barbarous rude savages lacking any knowledge of God (Englehardt 1912, and others) and by those who disapproved of the mission system but approved of the Spanish conquest of California (Bancroft 1884, 1886, and others). The Indian cultures which were destroyed by the Spanish and later American settlers have also been described many times, first by those who unquestioningly accepted the Spanish view of these people as simply taking what nature produced. This viewpoint gives justification to the conquerors because “they could use the land better.” More recently a number of researchers have been reading the Spanish descriptions of what they actually saw and have ignored the Spanish assumptions, but read the descriptions of the environment with the ecological knowledge necessary to recognize the existence of a man-made environment, not a “natural” environment. They have discovered evidence of complex hierarchical stratified social Systems which were ignored because the Spanish assumed they were not present (Kehoe 1981, Shipek 1981a). Others interviewed surviving Indians and have explored areas of Indian knowledge never explored before simply because it was assumed that they had no such knowledge. For example, it has been discovered that all groups had the knowledge of and worshipped a high creator God whose name was so sacred that it must not be mentioned except in the proper sacred areas and during the sacred ceremonies dedicated to the Creator.