Mission bells and devastation wrought by missionaries

Erasing history is a real concern, as written in a recent guest commentary by Anne Breiling. But in the case of the mission bells that have been installed up and down the State of California, the true historical erasure is that of the Native Californians. Theirs is a history that stretches back millennia, and yet, has been thoroughly erased by the Franciscan scholars who sought to glorify and celebrate their colonial settlements at the expense of Indigenous communities.

It is funny that Ms. Breiling brings up the book on Junipero Serra by Rose Marie Beebe and Bob Senkewicz, both colleagues and friends of mine. I wrote a review of the book a few years back, and am quite familiar with their work. I encourage Ms. Breiling to re-read the book, as she seems to have missed some of their key arguments. A central theme of the study is that Serra failed to understand the Indigenous people whom he sought to convert. The book explores Serra’s justifications for harsh corporal punishment, paternalism, and his constricting oversight of Native Californians, all for the crime of not adhering strictly to Catholic protocol, a religion that Native people neither asked for nor wanted imposed upon them. The book also explores Serra’s participation in the inquisition, hunting down and executing Jewish people in the Spanish colonies, and how these experiences contributed directly to Serra’s implementing cultural genocide as central to the process of conversion, erasing the traditional ways of Native Californians.

The lasting legacy of Serra and his fellow missionaries is the devastating impact on Native communities. At Mission Santa Cruz, nearly 2,300 Native people received baptism, but by the time the mission officially closed down in 1839, only 200 Indigenous people had survived; more than 90% of them died under the oversight of the missionaries. While Serra himself may have tried to protect

Native women from abuses by Spanish soldiers, the archives reveal that, at Mission Santa Cruz alone, Padres Fernandez, Quintana, Taboada y Gil, and Real are among those guilty of sexually abusing Native people or otherwise terrorizing Native villagers. And these are examples from only one mission.

The mission bells themselves have symbolized many different things to different people in different eras. We at State Parks are working on a virtual exhibit that addresses this complexity, that shows the changing significance of the bells over time for different communities. For Native people at the missions, these bells represented the imposition missionaries asserted over their daily lives. The bells rang to instruct them when to wake up, when to get to work, to stop to eat, to go back to work, and on and on. For contemporary Native communities like the Amah Mutsun, these bells are reminders of this dark time in their history. While the Franciscan side of this story has dominated the narrative over California history tracing back to the early 1900s, when California boosters and the automobile club decided to help romanticize the mission myth, we are finally at a time when these erasures and onesided histories are being called into question. The overlooked and marginalized histories and stories of Native Californians are finally, thanks to the tireless work of the Amah Mutsun and other contemporary Native Californians, beginning to receive public acknowledgement.

Ms. Breiling also brings up an important point regarding Spanish names across California’s landscape. The mountains, rivers, and valleys all have names given to them by the Native people who have lived here for generations before European arrival. When the Spanish arrived to these beautiful lands, rather than listening and learning from the people who had long called this place home, they imposed their values and culture upon everyone and everything. Today, we only know the Spanish names for places, their Native names having been erased through colonialism.

Ms. Breiling is right. It is finally time for us to end this historical erasure, to listen and learn the names and histories of these lands from Native Californians. Acknowledging that these bells memorialize traumas and loss is an important first step, a necessary step toward healing centuries- old wounds.

We at ttate Sarks are working on a virtual exhibit that addresses this complexity, that shows the changing significance of the bells over time for different communities.