How California can best confront its ugly, racist past
Julie Tumamait-Stenslie scoffs when she hears defenders of the Father Junipero Serra statue in Ventura say it honors the city’s founder.
She is tribal chair of the Barbareño/ Ventureño Band of Mission Indians (Chumash), whose ancestors lived for generations on the Channel Islands off the Santa Barbara-Ventura coast.
“There were cities on this land for thousands and thousands of years with social, political and religious customs,” Tumamait-Stenslie says. “Today you drive on our pathways, our trading networks. We’ve been in Ventura for thousands of years.”
And when Serra defenders say the 18th century Franciscan friar, who founded the California mission system during Spanish rule, protected and cared for Indigenous people, she replies:
“He did that because we were the free workforce, the slave labor for the missions. Of course he was going to protect us. What else would he do? Go out and actually pay somebody to do the work? He had free slave labor.”
Native Americans who tried to escape the missions were tracked down and often beaten. Many died of disease spread by the European invaders.
California’s Indigenous population exceeded 200,000 in 1800 but plummeted to about 15,000 by 1900.
“It’s called genocide,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said last year at a ceremony with tribal leaders as he formally apologized for the state. “No other way to describe it, and that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”
California Indians always had a legitimate grievance against Serra, but their voices stayed relatively muted until Pope Francis elevated the friar to sainthood in 2015. Then the vandalism and toppling of statues began.
When the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis policeman set off nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against racism, it rekindled anger over the mistreatment of Native Americans.
Indigenous activists tore down a Serra statue in Father Serra Park in downtown Los Angeles. Protesters in
San Francisco toppled a Serra statue in Golden Gate Park.
And in Ventura, trying to protect the community’s Serra statue from being spray-painted or ripped down, a coalition announced its intention to remove the monument from its prominent hillside location in front of City Hall overlooking downtown.
Tumamait-Stenslie, who lives in Ojai, says the statue symbolizes “the taking away of our livelihoods, our religion, our land — the genocide that changed us forever.”
“People say burn down the statue,” she continues, “but that’s not what we want. We don’t want it vandalized. We just want it removed from a public place.”
She, Ventura Mayor Matt LaVere and Father Tom Elewaut of the nearby Mission San Buenaventura would like it to be transferred to the mission that Serra founded.
Many of us are wrestling with this whole issue. For all the terror and misery Serra and Columbus brought, they are undeniably important figures in human history. One thing is clear: Society is now reappraising their legacies with clearer eyes, and we don’t like what we see.
Here is one way of honoring California history: Their places of honor should be taken by important California Indians. My nomination: Ishi of the Yahi tribe, believed to be the last or one of the last surviving Native Americans to emerge from the California wild.
The Yahi “were virtually annihilated in a series of massacres described by anthropologists as the fiercest and most uncompromising resistance met by Indians on the West Coast.” In 1911, Ishi came out from hiding, assuming he too would be killed by the white man.
The University of California Anthropology Museum took him in, studying the Stone Age survivor, working him as a janitor and using him as a museum attraction as he chipped arrowheads and shaped bows. More recent reports document his mistreatment at Berkeley. He died in 1916 of tuberculosis.
Ishi should be sculpted and honored in California’s Capitol.