California Indians Mission

Though warfare and attacks on entire villages took a definite toll on the populations of Native Americans, disease was by far the biggest killer. We’ve all heard the stories of smallpox infected blankets being given to the Native Americans, and other such atrocities, but I was simply dumbfounded at the actual numbers of dead due to Old World diseases being introduced to the New World, North America. While it has been somewhat difficult for scholars to determine the exact count of Indians who died from disease, they have fairly accurate estimates.

David Jones realizes their immune systems were weak, and he presents the question why: is it possibly because they were malnourished, exhausted, and stressed out due to Europeans? He speaks in detail about Indians being defenseless to pathogens, through homogeneity, and how their fates depended on their entire environment. Combined with their vulnerability, “it could well be [assessed] that the epidemics among American Indians, despite their unusual severity, were caused by the same forces of poverty, social stress, and environmental vulnerability that cause epidemics in all other times and

The Native American’s were the first known settlers in North America, ten thousand years before Columbus came to the continent. Their origins completely unclear, anthropologists believe there were three to five million Native Americans in North America in the year 1492 (Hoxie and Iverson, 1997). As early as the Revolutionary War in 1775, European settlers started taking note of the Native Americans. Unfortunately, the Native American population plunged significantly in the first decades after their first contact with Europeans. Native Americans were now unprotected and exposed to deadly diseases like smallpox, influenza, and measles which did not previously exist in their society (North American Natives, 2016).

The missions even encouraged it, offering Spanish men money and land in exchange for helping to unite the two cultures. However, although the men had no issue with bedding the Indian women, an insignificant percentage of them were willing to marry those women. The Spanish viewed the Indians as inferior and saw them as heathens that engaged in polygyny and homosexuality among other abhorrent acts. The missionaries especially frowned upon the berdaches that acted like and were treated as women, shaming and punishing them. In their attempts to “culture” the Indians, they created enemies of an otherwise peaceful people. The Spaniards engaged in what Father Junipero Serra referred to as a “plague of immorality”, raping Indian women out of stress and fear. The Mission of San Diego was destroyed by the Indians largely due to these acts, but only after the Indian population had been reduced to a fraction of what it was previously by diseases that had run rampant in their cramped living spaces in the Mission. The missionaries legitimately thought that they were saving these poor heathens, but in their ignorance they destroyed a

This section highlights that history has created a false narrative depicting the natives as a victimized people, which they were to some extent but only in the fashion that they did not possess the same technology for warfare, immunity of communal diseases transmitted, and they were not anticipating combat. All other factors considered, the natives stood to be a potential threat. In regards to knowledge obtained by Spaniards prior to arrival and knowledge gained from observation, it would be remiss had they not prepared for battle. This argument is not to be misconstrued in approving their actions; I do recognize colonization as an evil for both the reasons employed and its damaging effects, but rather to change the narrative surrounding that of the native people. While they did experience a tragedy, I feel that it is erroneous to write them into history as being incompetent resulting from their

The indigenous people of California had existed on the lands as hunters-gathers before the arrival of the Spanish who were the first Europeans to reach this part of the Americas. These settlers who began surveying the area since 1530, helped introduce the mission system around 1697 as part of an effort to set up permanent bases for new arrivals and as a bulwark against other European powers. This establishment caused the natives to transition from their original lifestyle into agrarian farmers to help bring in revenue for the Spanish crown which led to them being exploited economically in the process. To establish order in this new land, the Spaniards used harsh punishments for rooting out defiance within the Indian population. However, eventually the natives would begin to die off in such large quantities that it echoed what else was happening what was happening in the rest of the continent. Overall, the effect on the indigenous population was predominantly negative due to contributing towards loss of culture, experiencing callous treatment at the hands of the Spanish, and forced population decline.

In Deborah Miranda’s memoir “Bad Indians”, she uses documents, images, and drawings to expose colonial violence and provides evidence of a history of conquest. There are different types of colonial violence that are depicted throughout her memoir, such as: physical, emotional, sexual, and cultural violence. Additionally, Miranda exposes the nature of colonial violence by providing evidence by implementing particular sources to contribute in confirming the history of conquest throughout the lives of California Mission Indians.

There was a time when the entire world was at piece living with their own people on their own soil. There was no one attempting to overtake others and no one warring for land. However, that soon changed with the colonization of the Americas. Europeans came to America from all sides and took land as they saw fit in order to colonize it for themselves. The Spanish people were explorers who were interested in what this new land could bring to them and their people. This is what led to the colonization of the Chumash tribe by the Spaniards.

Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians utilizes a unique blend of writing styles to piece together a clearer and more distinct view on the Mission system, Gold Rush, and settlement of California. Through this revolutionary collection of writing, we receive a detailed account of the treatment that California Indians had to endure during the Missionization era and are able to draw our own conclusions in regard to whether the missions were a positive or negative aspect of California history. Although Miranda’s ancestors suffered and survived horrible conditions, she, in my opinion, does not villainize the Mission system, but rather displays the facts as they are, therein allowing us to reach our own conclusions in relations to this history. Because there

Reséndez’s emphasis on the Europeans’ actions rather than the European disease changes the perspective of colonial studies and supplements, rather than replaces, existing theories of depopulation like Crosby’s epidemic theory. It assigns active responsibility to Europe for the decimation of native populations (Reséndez, conversation in HIST 900, 2017). By addressing the European responsibility for Native American decimation, Reséndez transforms the existing narrative of Europe’s impact on the New World and redefines the story of the depopulation of Native American tribes.

When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away gives an in-depth history of the Pueblo Indians before and after the Spanish conquest. It describes the forced changes the Spanish brought to the Indians, and also the changes brought to the Spaniards who came to “civilize” the Indians. The author's thesis is that the Pueblo Indians and other Indians were treated cruelly by the Spanish, who justified their crime by claiming they were civilizing an

Colonialism has a historical context that has long obscured and distorted the experiences of indigenous people, particularly those who endured the brutalities of the California Missions. Although indigenous people are portrayed in history as docile people, who openly embraced invasion, Deborah Miranda dismantles this depiction in her memoir, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, through two stories called “Dear Vicenta” and “Novena to Bad Indians”. Throughout the stories run various narratives of survival and resistance, which form new understandings of colonization and missionization. Miranda practices decolonization through oral history in order to form new and ongoing indigenous identities. Evidently, through decolonial practice and deconstructing dominant narratives about “colonized” peoples and replacing them with stories that use traditional memory and practice, Miranda disrupts the commonly accepted narrative of indigenous peoples by reconstructing the dichotomy between good and bad Indians through acts of resistance and survival.

For more than 300 years, since the days of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish Government, an attempt of genocide of the Native American Indian has existed. From mass brutal murders and destruction by Spanish and American armies, to self-annihilation through suicide, homicide, and alcohol induced deaths brought about because of failed internal colonialism and white racial framing. Early Explores used Indigenous inhabitants upon first arriving to the America’s to survive the New World and once they adapted, internal colonialism began with attempts to convert the Indians to Christianity, repressing their values and way of life, forcing them into slavery, and nearly exterminating an entire culture from existence.

The new settlers of the “New World” all thought that they could use the local Indians as workers of the land that they took from them. However, with new settlers came new diseases that the American Indians where not use too.

This paper will discuss the impact Spanish colonization and Mexican control had on the indigenous Indian population in California between 1769 and 1848. As well as discussing the historical origins, social organizations, material conditions, and world-view of the California Indians prior to 1769, this paper will explain the impact of New Spain’s Mission System on the Alta California Indian population between 1769 to 1821 and the response of its system by the Indians.