Universities target relics of oppression
For many, state’s iconic mission bells recall atrocities
About 100 people gathered closely under dozens of towering redwoods one recent morning to witness the removal of a California mission bell from the UC Santa Cruz campus.
Getting to that point took more than a year of discussions between the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and the university, and it may have been the first removal of one of hundreds of iconic castiron bell markers dotting the landscape from San Diego to Sonoma County.
“I passed by this bell a lot,” said Julisa Lopez, 22, a 2018 UC Santa Cruz graduate and member of the Amah Mutsun. She traveled from Seattle to attend the ceremony. “Just walking by and knowing that this is what’s valued in society was really tough.”
The removal was the latest in an ongoing reassessment of how Californians commemorate the important but tainted role that the missions — 21 Catholic outposts built by the Spanish during the 18th and 19th centuries — played in the state’s history. Universities are leading the way, and it remains to be seen how far this goes.
Stanford last year removed prominent references on campus to Junipero Serra, the Catholic friar
who founded the first missions in California. The movement is in part inspired by the removal of Confederate monuments in the South. It comes amid similar reconsideration of historical portrayal and treatment of indigenous peoples in California — from the San Francisco school board voting to destroy a controversial historic mural to Gov. Gavin Newsom apologizing to Native Americans for how they were treated.
The 21 missions have long been a key part of California’s image, but perceptions are changing as the realities of mission life become more widely understood — slave labor, poverty, disease, forced religious conversion and violence are a big part of the legacy often left out of history lessons and textbooks.
The Amah Mutsun and other California indigenous people see the bell markers — more modern versions of those placed by the state of California more than a century ago to roughly mark the route from one mission to another — as racist symbols that glorify the domination and dehumanization of their ancestors.
“This had been a sick feeling in our gut for most of our lives,” said Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun , who led efforts to remove the bell.
“Growing up, we saw the missions and we knew that they were places of atrocity, of murder, rape, savagery, slavery and incarceration.”
The bell marker at UC Santa Cruz was donated to the campus in the 1990s by a local women’s club, according to the university. The university hasn’t decided what to do with the bell.
“We recognize as an educational institution, different people can look at the same historical artifact or marker and look at it through two very different lenses, depending on their own lived experiences and lived experiences of their ancestors,” said Sarah Latham, vice chancellor for business and administrative services at UC Santa Cruz.
“Some might pass by this bell and just view it as a marker. But others every day when they pass by this bell view it as a very powerful and painful symbol.”
At least one group criticized the school for removing what they said was a valuable piece of history that memorialized California’s early years.
“Removing any historical monument does nothing to undo the injustices of the past, but is rather a cheap plaster over history,” said the UC Santa Cruz College Republicans in a statement.
“We lose insight into how the forebearers of our shared human experience saw the world and their affairs. Rather than overcoming any form of discrimination or marginalization, this does nothing more for the people who carry the scars of the past than narrow their sight.”
The university is the latest among many academic institutions that in recent years have taken a new look at campus structures honoring history’s villains: slaveholders, leaders of the Confederacy and pro-pounders of hate.
Stanford last year removed Serra’s name from two dormitories and its own mailing address on Serra Mall. Serra, who established the first nine missions, was canonized by Pope Francis in 2015 amid protests across the state.
Steven Hackel, a history professor at UC Riverside, said he supports the movement to reevaluate historical items that “provoke and cause pain” to some, but said the issue should be discussed and researched.
“I think this a very deep question that we need to ponder,” Hackel said. “We need to reconsider the place of these monuments in public places. But I don’t think we want to move toward a society that sanitizes its past and prevents us from reliving these painful episodes.”
“I think we have to be mindful of what is lost when we remove some of these items,” he added.
The mission bell marker system was established along the entire length of El Camino Real in 1906. By 1913, more than 450 markers were placed on the historic route, according to the Department of Transportation. The bells were removed over the years due to damage, vandalism and theft.
State officials used $2 million in federal grants in 1996 to create the Caltrans Landscape Architecture Program, which installed hundreds of replicas of the original bell markers from Orange County to Sonoma.
There are an estimated 500 bell markers along California highways, according to an agency spokesman.
Lopez worked with UC Santa Cruz leaders to coordinate the bell’s removal. The Amah Mutsun are the direct descendants of the tribal groups whose villages and territories fell under the San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz missions during the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
The ceremony came just days after Newsom issued an apology through an executive order for the state’s wrongdoings against Native Americans. He also announced a Truth and Healing Council for American Indians to provide their perspective on the relationship between tribes and the state.
“California must reckon with our dark history,” Newsom said in a statement. “California Native American peoples suffered violence, discrimination and exploitation sanctioned by state government throughout its history.”
Meanwhile, Congress is considering legislation that would rescind 20 Medals of Honor awarded to U.S. soldiers for the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, in which nearly 300 Native Americans were killed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
After removing the bell from its concrete foundation, university employees gently placed it on the ground. Written in gold marker on the bell’s exterior was a message: “The strength of our ancestors is within us. The cycle is broken; our generation shall heal our ancestral pain.”