The Mission(s) of Father Serra
This picture in the wilds of Baja California, one hundred years ago,
is a pleasant, peaceful one to contemplate. We can see the little
group of dusky natives squatting contentedly around their
friar-friend, while floating skyward, through the stillness of the
starlight rises a ‘tender song of the love of God'.
A.H.
Fitch
When Junípero Serra, a Spanish monk of the powerful Franciscan
order, traveled north from Mexico City to Baja California in 1768, he
had the protection of Mexico’s colonial government in the form of
soldiers under the military command of Don Gaspar de Portolá. This
group established a series of Catholic missions guarded by soldiers
along the California coast, beginning at San Diego and ending at the
San Francisco bay in Alta California. These missions intended to
convert the native "gentiles", as the padres called the
Californians, into good Christian souls while also protecting Spanish
territory from Russian encroachment (Fitch 1914: 57).
The area had been explored by Spaniards, but at the time that Serra
and Portolá embarked on their journey there were no European
settlements in Alta California. However, a number of indigenous
tribes inhabited the region. Because of the primacy of missionaries
in establishing contact with these groups, we have very little
information about the pre-contact population and their practices that has not
been filtered through a Franciscan friar. In giving an account of the
natives in the area of the San Juan Capistrano mission, A.L. Kroeber,
an early twentieth-century scholar of native Californians, relies on
the work of one Father Geronimo Boscana, whose 1826 essay
"Chinigchinich" is the earliest resource on pre-mission
native life. Kroeber writes that, because of the sympathetic style
and comprehensiveness, Boscana’s “account of the religion and
social customs of the Juaneño is by far the most valuable document
on the California Indians preserved from the pen of any of the
Franciscan missionaries” (Kroeber 1976[1925]: 945).
Unfortunately, understanding accounts of the California natives form
the exception, not the rule, of Franciscan writing on the subject
(Fitch 1914: 34, 102). Of the natives of the region, Serra biographer
A.H. Fitch says that, “this then was the object of their existence,
to eat, to drink, to dance, to have wives in abundance. Such briefly
were the savages, for whose sake Fray Junipero Serra had painfully
journeyed long stretches of desert country” (1914: 127). Fitch
characterizes the Californians as hedonistic folk worthy of contempt.
This heightens the missionary “sacrifice” of Serra, and also
reflects a belief in the basic inferiority of those natives that
persisted into the twentieth century.
The Californians saw a new
form of life descend upon them forcibly when missionization began. To
start a mission one needed few things:
The business of founding a mission was usually a sufficiently simple
one. It was enough that a padre should consecrate some sort of a
shelter for a church, that he should be furnished with two or three
sacred vessels and a small stock of provisions for himself and the
soldiers who remained with him. Spiritual work was then at once
begun. (Fitch 1914: 185)
The church was of
course the most important part of the settlement. Relying on
curiosity and the neophytes who had already joined the group to
attract natives to their traveling party, the padres began saving
souls right away. Fitch includes one interesting account of such a
conversion from Serra’s own journal. After traveling for several
days without blessing any “wild” Indians, the mission party
spotted some gentiles.
“Two Gentiles were again visible on the same height, and our
Indians—shrewder than yesterday, went to catch them with caution
that they should not escape them. And although one fled from between
their hands they caught the other. They tied him, and it was all
necessary, for even bound he defended himself that they should not
bring him and flung himself upon the ground with such violence that
he scraped and bruised his thighs and knees. But at last they brought
him. They set him before me” …After making the sign of the cross
over him, Junípero untied him, still ‘most frightened and
disturbed’ (Fitch 1914: 90).
By force the
Californians were subject to the shock of Catholicization, though
many came into mission life of their own accord. In order to retain
the converts the padres immediately gave them food. It was expected
that the natives would work in exchange for such support.
References
Fitch, A.H. Junipero Serra: The Man and His Work. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1914.
Kroeber, A.L. Handbook of the Indians of California. New York: Dover Publications, 1976.