Reimagining Native California with Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Abstract

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...