When I look at how our history is presented often versus how history and how our culture is presented in my family, the two don't match up because what I see in my family is strength. I see perseverance. I see modern people who live modern lifestyles, who have respect for the past, who are trying to make things right. There has to be a breath of honesty in history. And oftentimes we romanticize history.
Mission history is often just taught from a very staunchly pro-Spanish perspective, even in public schools. It just didn't happen that along come the Spanish and the history of California started there. It wasn't a wilderness, untamed wilderness. The land was under the control of Indian people.
The Padres and the Spanish soldiers came from the south to colonize California in 1769 to create a land base that they could call New Spain. They wanted to expand it from what is now Mexico, Baja, to Alta California which is now the state of California. The first four major sites were the harbors of California, of Upper California. So San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Francisco. The Spanish needed to establish those harbors because they were afraid in the late 18th century that the Russians were coming down from Alaska looking for foods to supply their colonies.
The Russians did get as far as 100 miles north of San Francisco at what today we call Fort Ross. Back then was Fort Ruski. So they were concerned about the Russians. Sir Francis Drake had been here in the bay and he was, if you were the king of Spain, he was a pirate because he was robbing the Manila galleon ships, making the Queen of England very, very wealthy.
But the king of Spain, he was a pirate. So Spain was concerned about the British. France had control of a great, great portion of middle America. So the King of Spain is worried about the Emperor Napoleon marching this way to occupy upper California.
The King of Spain was concerned that if these other foreign countries arrived here, they would keep marching south to Mexico City and attack Spain in Mexico City. So the way to defend Mexico was to establish presidios at the four great... upper California harbors. The Spanish Padres and their force of soldiers came here and disrupted the lives of the native Californians. They were looking for large populations of natives in their various communities so that they could immediately have a large labor force established.
And the Spanish method for establishing a Presidio was to take the native peoples of an area, teach them how to build Spanish style, and then have them build and people these new areas in the Spanish way. The Spanish method for doing this was to send the Padres, the priests, because part of the Spanish philosophy was to take the people you find in all these new places, new to the Spanish, not to the natives, in these places and change them into good Spaniards. And part of the process of changing them was to begin with changing them into good Christians, into good Catholics. So the instruments of change, not only of the religion, but of language, of culture, of lifestyle, of religion, everything about the native peoples, the people who were to do the changing, the job task was the fathers, the padres.
So the task was To bring Native peoples into missions, teach them how to build a mission, and then they would be the workers that would go over and build the Presidio. It was a commercial venture. The Natives here were the labor force, and they weren't even the paid labor force. It was indentured servitude. They had to work in the fields.
Daily life for Indians in the mission system was deplorable. Being dragged from your own village, where you lived a life of peace, usually, to being a slave laborer in a mission context, where you were separated from your family. The men were in one dorm, the women were in another dorm, and the children were separated from the women. A lot of sexual abuse, a lot of physical abuse occurred.
They were raped by the soldiers. If you didn't work the way they wanted you to work, you were beaten severely. There was outright killing, but I think the biggest crippling effect of the Spanish mission on Native Americans People in California were the diseases that were brought to California by the soldiers and the Padres. Things like diphtheria, things like influenza, things like smallpox and other diseases for which the native people had no immunity.
If you took ill very seriously they didn't necessarily try to heal you. They gave up on you. You had to die. There are a lot of people buried around these missions.
A lot of children buried around the missions. And so we lost hundreds of thousands of Native people to diseases. It was a total destruction of their traditional way of life.
If we're presenting mission history from An aspect of social justice, of doing the right thing, of making sure that we're trying to be fair and be honest and accurate, then it does good for everybody. Not just us, but also letting the truth out and letting people know the history of our mission and how it's directly affected to the history of California.