Julio César, Luiseño Musician: California Indian Oral Tradition, Franciscan Music Instruction, and California Missions, 1769–1846

Reimagining Native California with Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir Laura M. Furlan (bio) and Lydia M. Heberling (bio) no sainthood for father serra the pope values slavery, rape, murder jesus forgave killers he didn’t make them saints return the presidio to the muwekma ohlone nation On a sunny September afternoon in 2015, members of the Muwekma Ohlone Nation and their allies gathered outside Mission Dolores in San Francisco, California, to protest Pope Francis’s canonization of the eighteenth-century Spanish priest, Father Junípero Serra. The epigraphs that open this introduction are reproduced from several of the protest signs on display at the demonstration, signaling that for the Muwekma Ohlone Nation, Father Serra’s legacy for missionized California Indian communities is one of death, violence, and cultural destruction. In 1769 Serra established the first of twenty-one missions in California, an imperial act that simultaneously catalyzed the settlement of the region and devastated its Indigenous populations. Hupa scholar Cutcha Risling Baldy writes, “Choosing to canonize [Serra] is choosing to canonize what he proliferated while he was running the mission system”—actions such as sexually assaulting Native women, forcing Native peoples into slave-like working conditions, beating Native laborers with lashes and clubs, and starving Native peoples (Risling Baldy). The quarterly publication News from Native California published an online blog of responses from the California Indian community regarding canonization. In one reflection, Nicole Meyers-Lim (Pomo), Executive Director of the [End Page ix] California Indian Museum and Cultural Center, writes, “There is a great deal of romanticism that surrounds the legacy of Father Junípero Serra. If he is elevated to symbolize sainthood and civilization in California, then his legacy must also be accountable for disease, starvation, indenture, extermination, violence, rape, infant mortality and other heinous impacts of the Spanish mission system upon California Indians” (NfNC). For California Native peoples, the canonization of Father Serra was an ultimate example of ongoing colonial gaslighting from the Catholic Church. The creation of this special section of SAIL coincides with the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the missions in California, and this is an opportune moment to examine several expressions of creative sovereignty in ways that amplify California Indian survivance through centuries of violence, erasure, and genocide. Indigenous survivors of the missions’ violent legacy have long been challenging the glorification of Spanish missions—have always, in fact, resisted it—yet the dominant narrative continues to be slow to change. In schools, in popular culture, in the pervasive architectural “visual mythology” of California, the Spanish missions are memorialized as bastions of progress, development, and settlement (Miranda, BI xvii). The complex legacy of the Spanish missions has been reified in California’s fourth grade public school curriculum, which had required students, until 2017, to build a replica of a mission as a pedagogical tool for teaching characteristic attributes of mission life. The missions created the footprint for the state’s contemporary large-scale agricultural industry and “tamed”—Christianizing, educating, and often eradicating—its Indigenous population. For California Indian communities, Spanish missionization was devastating. Disease, violence, and death accompanied the priests and soldiers, leaving California Indian populations drastically affected. While waves of settler colonialism washed across North America and transformed life for Indigenous peoples everywhere, what we now know as California was the site of a particularly pernicious form of genocidal erasure that began with the missions and continued through Mexican and US occupations. The essays that follow focus specifically on Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen1 and Chumash author Deborah Miranda’s innovative mixed-media, mixed-genre text Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), which engages with the histories of California Indians and the multiple [End Page x] consequences of the mission system. Bad Indians contextualizes Miranda’s personal experiences as a Native woman in the histories of her ancestors and the structures of empire and colonialism as they manifested in what is now California. In scrapbook fashion, Miranda constructs a narrative mosaic out of a number of documents from personal and public archives: family photographs, audio recordings of family members, mission records, the journals of Mission priests, pages from the field notes of notable California ethnographers such as J.P. Harrington, and...

Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California

During the past fifty years much scattered writing has appeared about the arts of the neophyte Indians resident in the California missions. But these arts: the sculpture and carving in stone and wood, the work in metal, the paintings on the walls and on canvas, most of these are not truly Indian. The California Indians were on the whole at a cultural level far below that of the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, to say nothing of those of Mexico. They were as primitive and backward as any in the western hemisphere. They had no writing, they had little social organization, they knew nothing of metals. Their housing was either huts of rushes or caves; they wore little or no clothing. Their arts were unusually primitive; pottery was almost unknown. Basketry, or the weaving of baskets, was the only craft that reached a considerable development, and the patterns and designs throughout the state are comparable to those of any Indian culture. Several techniques of weaving were used and the decorations comprised designs often using several colors. Sometimes shell mosaics were applied to the baskets to create more interesting patterns.

Background and Aims: Instructor competence is especially critical for instructors at the university level as they often teach already skilled students, and there is the expectation of a more rigorous and in-depth educational experience. This study sought to develop a music instructor competency model for higher education instructors in Guizhou, China. The study objectives were: (1) To determine the desired knowledge and competencies for music instructors in higher education; (2) To measure the current and desired music instructors' knowledge and competencies in universities in Guizhou Province, China, (3) To find the gap between the current and desired music instructors' levels of knowledge and competencies in universities in Guizhou Province, China, and (4) To develop a proposed competency model for music instructors in Guizhou Province, China. Methodology: An exploratory sequential mixed methods instrument development design was used. Music instructors from six normal universities and eight comprehensive universities were the population for the study. The sample size was 429 music instructors. Gap analysis using the PNI modified method. Results: The priority needs ranked from highest to lowest were music instructor self-image, skill, technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, attitude, and content knowledge. A model was proposed and subsequently validated by experts. The model is intended to be used as a guide for music instructor evaluation and identifying areas for professional development and growth. Conclusion: the key priorities for music instructors were highlighted by the study, which placed a strong emphasis on knowledge, talent, and self-image. The study concluded with the validation of a model intended to improve evaluation and promote professional development in the industry.

No one has published more on mission populations than Robert H. Jackson. Here, as the subtitle indicates, he seeks to compare a region in South America with one on the north Mexican frontier in terms of environmental, economic, and political impacts and sociocultural variations. Jackson presents a chronology of mission building in each of his study areas, then comments in the following chapter. Unfortunately, his writing is choppy and frequently confusing, contributing to the unevenness of this book.Jackson concludes that missionaries who tried to implement Mediterranean-style agriculture in the New World had to modify their approach to semitropical, tropical, semiarid, and arid environments, but this is already well known. He is on firmer ground discussing the differing mortality rates between the Guarani Indians in present-day Paraguay and Indians in northern Mexico. The Guarani population was much larger than other mission populations, and they practiced sedentary agriculture. Their populations remained dispersed even during missionization, and they were better able to withstand and recover from European diseases. Indians of the Californias, Texas, and other northern regions were hunter-gatherers with smaller population bases, and missionaries concentrated them in mission settlements that unintentionally facilitated the spread of disease that led to low fertility, high mortality, and hence rapid depopulation.A decade ago, Jackson began to make important comparisons between mission Indian populations and Spanish settlers in Alta California, especially in the areas of infant mortality and life expectancy. He continues that work here. Jackson compares Spanish presidial life in Alta California with the French at Fortress Louisbourg near Newfoundland. Both populations exhibited high mortality rates, but also high fertility rates, and newborns had a life expectancy of 20 – 30 years. This was far greater than that of missionized Indians, where high mortality rates coincided with very low fertility rates and accelerated population collapse.There are serious deficiencies in the graphic presentation of information. Six of thirteen maps are unreadable, as are nearly all the figures (mainly bar graphs); this is caused by both poor tonal separation and the partial obscuring of names on the graphs. Scattergram population figures suffer the same lack of tonal separation and are unexplained. More than 170 photographs illustrate the work, yet many are too dark and not directly tied to the text. Appendix A, “Building Construction in the California Missions,” replicates a table from an earlier publication (Jackson and Edward D. Castillo, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization [1995]), although here it is enhanced with photos. The brief, nonanalytical index appears not at the end of the book but between the appendixes and the bibliography. A supplemental CD available from the publisher provides the maps and some photographs in greater clarity, along with PowerPoint presentations (for teachers?) on each of the mission regions studied.More significantly, major topics and relevant scholarship are not addressed. Despite the title, Jackson does not discuss the concepts of frontier, borderlands, Bourbon vs. Habsburg methods of evangelizing, or historiographical controversies on the frontiers he compares. Jackson’s misrepresentation of my argument about the role of venereal disease in the decline of Alta California mission populations is unfortunate and undermines the credibility of his work. And how can anyone write on this topic without reference to the previous scholarship of the dean of borderlands historians, David J. Weber?Jackson’s book had the misfortune to appear simultaneously with Weber’s Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (2005), a study in toto of the Spanish frontiers in North and South America covering all missions, as well as Spain’s other two frontier instruments for dealing with Indians: merchants and the military. Weber’s book is an engagingly written work of synthesis deeply rooted in both archival and scholarly work. More reasonably priced, Bárbaros will likely become the volume for course adoption. Jackson’s Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish America, with the supplemental CD, may aid in teacher preparation and without it will be of interest to specialists.

Fornication, wrote Fathers Magin Catala and Jose Viader in 1814, ranked among most dominant vices of the at Mission Santa Clara, near the San Francisco Bay in Alta California.1 Other missionaries agreed. dominant vices of the wrote Fathers Narciso Duran and Buenaventura Fortuny from nearby Mission San Jose, those which are prohibited in the fifth, sixth, seventh and the first part of the eighth commandments of the holy law of God.2 Those commandments enjoined believers to refrain from murder, fornication, theft, and lying. Of the sixteen missions responded to the question, Which vices are the most dominant among them and in which sex?, thirteen mentioned impurity, unchastity, incontinence, lust, or fornication.3 Clearly, to the missionaries, sexual immorality was a major problem. But how did the Central Californians themselves perceive their sexual conduct? By reinterpreting the missionaries' reports about Native Americans' marriage and sexuality in Missions San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose in the light of anthropological evidence on Central Californian Indians, I argue what the missionaries saw as the sexual immorality of Catholic Indians, the Central Californians themselves likely interpreted as legitimate sexual behavior. Before the Spanish arrived, many small tribelets occupied the San Francisco Bay area. They spoke dialects of five mutually unintelligible languages: Costanoan, Bay Miwok, Coast Miwok, Patwin, and Wappo. Anthropologists and historians believe these tribelets were culturally similar, though geography and ecology caused some differences between tribelets in different areas. Tribelets interacted regularly, creating social, political, and economic ties bound them to their neighbors.4 For the Spanish crown, the Alta California missions were an inexpensive means of establishing a physical presence in lands claimed by the Spanish crown, thus discouraging incursions by the British, Americans, and Russians. Missions San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose were among the last of the missions to be founded, beginning in 1776, 1777, and 1797, respectively. As they founded missions, the Spanish also established military outposts and civil settlements, the latter often inhabited by soldiers and, occasionally, their families. Men formed the overwhelming majority of the early settlers in Alta California. The first president of the California missions, Junipero Serra, urged the government to send more families to live in the region, so that the Indians, who until now have been very surprised to see all the men without any women, see there are also marriages among Christians.5 In the San Francisco Bay area, the Hispanic colonists built the San Francisco presidio in 1776 and settled the town of San Jose in 1777. Fourteen families lived in San Jose, nine of them headed by soldiers.6 The settlements grew slowly; by 1810, according to the historian of California Hubert Howe Bancroft, the Hispanic population of the Bay Area remained under five hundred.7 Scholars studying the Spanish missions in Aha California disagree-sometimes vehemently-about whether the mission system was helpful or harmful to the Native American population of the area. Yet whether they see the missions as an oppressive regime designed to destroy Native American cultures or as the most effective means of protecting Indians from the deleterious effects of Spanish invasion, scholars rarely question the ideological dominance of Catholicism within the mission walls. Scholars who see the mission system in a positive light tend to follow the missionaries' own understanding of the missions as islands of Catholicism in a sea of traditional Indian religion.8 On the other side of the debate, scholars who see the missions as oppressive institutions have tended to be interested in Native American resistance to the mission system. They have focused their research on physical resistance, primarily in the forms of armed conflict and fugitivism. …

Reviewed by: Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 Kathleen Duval (bio) Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850. By Steven W. Hackel. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Pp. xx, 476. Illustrations, maps. Paper, $22.50.) In the 1930s, Indians from the Monterey Bay region still came every year on the feast day of San Carlos to the ruins of Mission San Carlos Borromeo. Standing amidst the rubble, they celebrated mass, chanted in Latin, and elected one of their own to serve as captain of the celebration. [End Page 489] Mission San Carlos was the place where Franciscan priests shackled and whipped these people's ancestors. When Mexican officials ended the mission system in the 1820s, they viewed mission Indians as slaves who needed emancipating. How, then, do we explain their descendants' commemoration and devotion? Steven Hackel explores the complexities of power and religion at Mission San Carlos. His extensive research on that mission and on the larger history of Alta California and his use of the methods of ethnohistory and the new Indian history provide insights far beyond one community. Hackel begins before the missions when more than 2,500 people lived in small communities in the Monterey region. They belonged to two linguistic groups, Costanoan and Esselen. Unlike almost all Native North Americans, California Indians were not agricultural at the time of European arrival, not because they were "backward," as most Europeans viewed them, but because they had found other means of supporting a fairly dense population, including trading with neighbors and manipulating their environment through irrigating and pruning the berry bushes and nut trees from which they gathered. The Spanish had claimed Alta California since the sixteenth century, but proving their claim became urgent in the late 1760s, as the British expanded west after winning the Seven Years' War and as Russian trade grew in the north Pacific. The Enlightenment-influenced Spanish crown wanted to decrease the role of priests, but the empire was spread too thinly across the hemisphere to deny the Franciscan request to establish a string of missions along the coast of Alta California. In 1769, university professor Junípero Serra began with Mission San Diego, and, by the time of the Mexican War of Independence, his priests had baptized more than 70,000 of Alta California's Indians. To explain why Indians came to missions, Hackel identifies the "dual revolutions" of European diseases and European plants and animals. A devastating loss of life combined with ecological changes to undercut the region's economy. In large part, Costanoans and Esselens moved to missions because they were hungry, and the missions efficiently organized Indian labor into agricultural production. Franciscans facilitated Indians' decision to settle in missions by focusing on practice more than belief. Elsewhere, revolts at some missions and disappointingly incomplete conversions at most had taught Europeans that missionizing was a long-term process, and their assumption of California Indians' primitiveness made them think converting them would [End Page 490] take even longer. As Hackel vividly demonstrates, religious art, priests' vestments, music, and elaborate processions on holy days bound mission Indians and Franciscans in a shared sense of the sacred, whether or not they agreed on the meanings. But when the Franciscans drew the line, they drew it hard. As Hackel shows, in matters of sexuality, they were strict and often vicious. Hackel balances Indian subjection and Indian power with the compelling argument that "Indians pursued a variety of survival strategies rooted in their cultures" but, in so doing, they "often unintentionally reinforced colonists' hold on the region" (1). Because Spaniards did not have complete power over Indians, Indians influenced the missions, but their involvement helped the mission system to succeed and gradually become a dominant institution in their homeland and an instrument of cultural change. In discussing the painting of the archangel Raphael at Santa Inés Mission, reproduced on the book's cover, Hackel illustrates this tension. The Chumash Indian artist painted wings on the archangel that look like the California condor...

Settler Women and Frontier Women:The Unsettling Past of Western Women's History Albert L. Hurtado (bio) My interest in western women's history and the history of gender developed from my graduate study in California Indian history in the 1970s. In those days there was simply no such thing as Indian women's history. There was Indian history (or ethnohistory), and there was women's history, two discrete fields that then did not intersect. I took a reading course in women's history and learned a lot from it, but I did not see what it had to do with Indian history. In the course of writing my dissertation I looked at some basic demographic data on Indians and discovered something disturbing: In California Native women died at much higher rates than Indian men. The ramifications of these data included a depressed birth rate that contributed to a rapidly declining population. If these trends continued unchecked to their logical statistical conclusion, it would mean that Native populations eventually would die out. Put another way, without women who gave birth to and raised enough children to replace the Indian population, Indian history would literally end. Of course, Native people did not come to this catastrophic end. Nor do I want anyone to think that this is an argument that supports the idea that it is the biological duty of all women to procreate for the continuation of any particular ethnic group. I do want to emphasize that because I was forced to consider matters like the decline in birthrates, women's relative population, and related matters, women became central to the story that I was trying to tell. I found that I had to explain why the number of Indian women was declining. As it turned out, there were historical reasons to account for these developments. So, because I considered one basic question about Indians (How many Indian women were there?) I had to rethink my entire dissertation and the book that grew out of it. I learned that women's history was not a hermetically sealed field of study that was relevant only to those with a special interest in women's history (or "herstory" as some people then called it). Clearly, the fate of Indian women had a lot to do with the whole story of [End Page 1] Indians, not only in California, but everywhere. I was not the first historian to recognize the central importance of women in history, but for me it was a revelatory and life-changing event. Historical demography drove me to think about women in Indian history, and it has also made me think about other women in western history. I use the term "settler women" to mean all non-Indian women. "Frontier women" refers to all women who lived in a frontier region. I use the term "Anglo American" (even though it is often an imprecise designation) in order to distinguish among peoples of Anglo American, Hispanic, Asian, and Indian heritage. There are two things that are well known about non-Indian women in frontier regions: There were relatively few of them, and they reproduced at heroic rates. Indeed, these population characteristics of settlers have been described not only in the American West but in frontier regions throughout the world. The shortage of women had a far different meaning among settler populations than it did for California Indians. Instead of being a symptom of population decline, the sex ratio imbalance of the invading population heralded eventual population growth, conquest of Native peoples, and hegemony. The few women who came at first and the many who followed contributed to these results. In short, a few women with high birthrates plus steady in-migration of new, fertile women eventually out-populated Native peoples. At the same time, Indians were often moving out of regions that whites were taking over. So the number of women matters, but numbers alone do not predict historical outcomes. Biological reproduction, no matter how spectacularly high the rate, does not in itself account for the successful repopulation of the American West by white Anglo Americans. Women contributed to other sorts of reproduction that were crucial to outcomes that are...

False historical narratives devoid of Indian perspective have dominated California social science curricula in the K-12 public schools. For generations, curriculum has celebrated the California mission system despite its harmful effects on California Indians. Fortunately, a large cast of California Indian community members, history experts, university leaders, and educators are looking to correct the narrative. Their efforts include the California Indian History Curriculum Coalition (CIHCC), whose primary focus is to promote California Indian-vetted curriculum and resources for immediate adoption; the California Department of Education's undertaking to adopt a new California History-Social Science Framework; and recent statewide legislative actions to mandate Ethnic Studies in the curriculum at the K-12 and university level. These efforts represent educators taking action to challenge how history is taught in our K-12 schools and in higher education. The authors discuss challenges and landmarks in these organic and concurrent efforts as we envision creating a more accurate and balanced California history.

Background/Context Across the nation, people living in the United States are embroiled in conflict over the meaning of its past. Many of the most fervent conflicts relate to acts of historical violence: war, enslavement, conquest, and colonization among them. Elementary school students commonly study the early colonization of the land now known as the United States, the nation's Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and other periods of history that historians describe as rife with violence. In the field of California colonial history, there is virtual consensus among historians that the Spanish mission system was a period of violence and devastation, most especially for California Indians, but school history curricula have been criticized for avoiding this history of violence. This raises questions about the role of intellectual honesty in teaching elementary-aged students about U.S. history. Though a small body of scholarship engages with questions of whether and how to talk with young children about human atrocity, few studies have empirically examined what state-recommended elementary school curriculum actually say about historical violence in the formation of the United States. Research Questions/Focus of Study This study examines the representation of violence in state-recommended elementary school history textbooks on the topic of the Spanish colonization of California. Specifically, the study responds to the following questions: How do the textbooks’ content address the topic of violence? Are California Indian and Spanish acts of violence represented differently? If so, how? Research Design Data were derived from a content analysis of fourth grade-level history textbooks recommended by the California State Department of Education in public use at the time of the study. Data Collection and Analysis Using qualitative coding software, chapters on California colonial mission history in each of the four state-recommended textbooks were coded and analyzed at the level of the sentence (n = 1,601). Coding and analysis took place in two stages. First, each sentence was coded for references to violence and ethnic group(s), which allowed for analysis of the number of references to acts of violence and ethnic groups throughout the entirety of the text. The second stage more closely examined the set of sentences that referred specifically to violence, allowing for comparison of the representation of violence according to the ethnic group with which it was associated. Findings/Results The study shows that violence is only minimally addressed in California fourth-grade history textbook content on the topic of Spanish colonization. Although generally underrepresented throughout the text, California Indian people are disproportionately over-represented as perpetrators of violence in the early colonization of California, a framing that is drastically out of alignment with the historical record as it is agreed upon by historians. Conclusions/Recommendations This study makes two key conclusions. First, the article argues that, in this case, elementary school history curriculum presents a distorted vision of violence in the colonial past. Second, the article complicates the issue of when young children are old enough to learn about violent histories in school by revealing that they are already learning about violence in the past, although such representation is both minimal and problematic. The article concludes by recommending the design of learning activities that engage in preparatory version of a more intellectually honest investigation of the historical record, as well as its relationship to the present.

Reviewed by: From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions by Craig H. Russell Robert R. Grimes S.J. From Serra to Sancho: Music and Pageantry in the California Missions. By Craig H. Russell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480 pp. $65.00. In a 1970s liturgical magazine an article appeared entitled "Pocahontas Never Sang Gregorian Chant," never considering the fact that she was baptized in the Church of England. Over many years of research on American Catholic church music the title has amused me as I have come across example after example of Native American Catholics employing chant, from the Mohawk and Passamaquoddy tribes of the Northeast to the missions of California. Although there have been important studies of the music of the Franciscan missions of California before, Craig Russell has produced what must be called a library of materials concerning musical life in and around the missions. The work is extensively documented. For example, chapter one contains thirty-five pages of text followed by twenty pages of footnotes. In addition, Oxford University Press maintains on their website an extensive array of additional documentation and resources collected by the author. In spite of this, the author says that he chose to write "a human narrative" rather than an encyclopedia. He has, in my opinion, actually succeeded at both. The title of this book refers to two Franciscan missionaries, Blessed Junipero Serra, the friar who founded and oversaw the Catholic missions in what is today the state of California, and Juan Bautista Sancho, in the author's estimation one of the most important musicians working in the early nineteenth century missions. The Franciscans took over the missions in Baja California after King [End Page 75] Carlos III of Spain ordered the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768. These missions were soon handed over to the Dominicans while the Franciscans headed north to Alta California. Serra worked in the missions from the foundation of San Diego in 1769 until his death in 1784 at the Carmel Mission. Sancho arrived in Mexico from Europe in 1803 and worked in the Mission of San Antonio de Padua from shortly thereafter until his death in 1830. It is entirely possible that no one reader would be interested in every aspect of Russell's work. Conversely most everyone would find something of interest within its vast range. The introduction is a fine overview of the historiography of the California missions and would be a useful reading in American history and American Catholic Studies courses. Music theorists would find the second chapter of particular interest with its discussion of notation and modes. Historical musicologists will be fascinated by the presence of orchestral masses in early European classical style and the extensive manuscript research the author presents. Ethnomusicologists will find the discussion of dance and pageantry enlightening as well as the discussion of Native American music in the missions. Performers and choir directors will benefit from the performing editions of a number of mission-related works contained on the website. Historians will benefit from seeing life in the California missions in a new light and continuing this research with the many original documents and photographs included in both the book and website. In a work of this impressive scope it is inevitable that some errors can be found, particularly in the case of Catholic theology and practice. For example, the author speaks of a mass setting used on Good Friday (311), a day when no mass in permitted in Catholic worship. In another place the author uses "adoration" and "veneration" interchangeably in regard to the Blessed Mother (303-304) when only the latter is allowed. These are, however, small errors in a generally magnificent piece of scholarship. Average readers should not be dissuaded from reading From Serra to Sancho. They might well want to skip over some of the more technical sections of the volume, but should not overlook the photographic section of the website. Readers will encounter scenes ranging from the comic (a friar in a shed celebrating mass atop a clavichord while he accompanied himself) to the sublime (Native American orchestras at mass). Most of all, they will find the author...

Coronary heart disease mortality for six ethnic groups in California, 1990-2000.

From Ahogado to Zorrillo: external causes of mortality in the California missions

Because of its geographical separation from other Spanish colonies and the rigid mercantilistic policy of its mother country, Alta California was completely isolated from outside influence during its first sixteen years as a Spanish province. Gradually, however, as a result of the explorations of Captain James Cook (1728-1779), foreign vessels began to appear in the area. When the fur trade started flourishing in the Pacific Northwest, European and American ships as well as overland expeditions were attracted further south to the ports and population centers of California.

Political economy of the Alta California missions -- Aspects of social and cultural change in the mission communities -- Demographic collapse in the Alta California missions -- Resistance and social control in the Alta California missions -- Mission secularization and the development of Alta California in the 1830s and 1840s -- Conclusions.