The Indian

The Presidio Park sculpture by Arthur Putnam

Midway through writing a brief paragraph for yesterday’s Blog post about Mission de Alcala in San Diego, I hesitated momentarily as I was composing the sentence that begins with “Father Serra… engaged the indigenous Kumeyaay People.”  Several words came to mind before I hit the keys to write engaged.”  The choice was deliberate because I knew at that moment I would come back to the scant historical record about what happened in “Mission Valley” between 1774 and 1777 as the first in the chain of California missions was being established. Devaluing all spiritual practices of Native Americans, the early Father in mission records present a Eurocentric picture of California Indian life before the Spanish came.  All Native Americans were thought by the church to be lost souls bound for perdition before missionaries came to save them. California Indians were described by church writers as having had no strong social, political, or economic structure.  They were described as having lived in misery before the missionaries came.  The church fathers said “the Indians had no sense of fidelity to each other,” so the friars deliberately worked to replace all native spiritual and cultural practices with the church sacraments and work in the service of the church.  Scholars have gathered accounts of brutality and degrading conditions imposed on the natives in order to save them… and to get the work done that was needed to build a mission.  The missionaries employed methods to convert Indians that wouldn’t be tolerated for missionaries to use today.  

In the middle of the last century a board of directors was established to promote the Junipero Serra Cause for Canonization.  Evidence of miracles was needed. A reported recovery of a nun from lupus led Pope John Paul II in 1988 to declare the beatification of Father Serra. He hasn’t been made a saint yet, but he is just one miracle away from being elevated to sainthood.   During his homily at Serra’s beatification, the Pope said: “Relying on the divine power of the message he proclaimed, Father Serra led the native peoples to Christ—and he sought to further their authentic human development on the basis of their new-found faith as persons created and redeemed by God.”

The San Diego Historical Society’s summer publication in 1989 included a review of The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide.  You can find it on the WEB:

http://www.sandiegohistory.org/journal/89summer/br-missions.htm