Decolonizing California Native Histories

Our next speaker, it is a pleasure to introduce, Professor Kutcha Risling-Baldy. Dr. Kutcha Risling-Baldy is an associate professor and the department chair of Native American Studies at Humboldt State University. Dr. Risling-Baldy is Hupa, Yorat, Karuk, and an enrolled member of the Hupa Valley tribe in Northern California. She received her PhD in Native American Studies with a designated emphasis in feminist theory and research from the University of California, Davis, and her Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Literary Research from San Diego State University. Her research focuses on California Indians, Indigenous feminisms, social environmental justice, and decolonization. Her first book, We Are Dancing For You, Native Feminism and the Revitalization of Women Coming of Age Ceremonies, addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities. In 2007, she co-founded the Native Women's Collective, a non-profit organization that supports the continued... Revitalization of Native American Arts and Culture. Dr. Rizalene Boldy, thank you. Thank you so much for that great introduction. I am going to share my screen also so I can share a presentation. Just give me one minute. So I decided to title the presentation today, universal accessories are hella creepy This is kind of where I'm at in my thinking about how to like talk to people specifically about this issue and what's going on right now. I'm going to talk a little bit about toppling the fourth grade California Mission Project, the rewriting and rewriting of history. But I do want to begin today with a land acknowledgement. So I am fortunate enough to be a professor here in my home territory near the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. Right now I am joining you from Wiat land near Padua which is the Mad River. I'm in McKinleyville and the Wiat peoples are very near and dear to my heart and I appreciate all the work that they are doing throughout this region to be able to work on decolonization and land return. And we are celebrating here in our area the return of land to indigenous peoples, the return of a sacred site from the city of Eureka to the Wiat tribe just this past year. So I think that we're seeing really amazing things happening throughout the state of California that we should always honor. But because I also spent some time in San Diego, both to get my master's degree, but also as a professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State. I did also want to begin today because when I do land acknowledgments, it's very important to me that I don't just tell you about the people, but that I give you some. course of action that I'm asking you to do as part of my land acknowledgement, because I don't think that land acknowledgements work unless we are compelling people towards something. We shouldn't just be acknowledging peoples. We should be saying how people can actually support, center, and bring forward Indigenous issues in a really meaningful way, because that's what a land acknowledgement is supposed to be for. So I needed to give you some things that you could do today as part of my land acknowledgement. The first is I'm asking people on the call if they will donate to the Kumeyaay to Gain Your Land Conservancy. This is actually the link if you would like to donate. This allows you to help the conservancy to protect ancestral lands, to further get ancestral lands in the Kumeyaay area, to manage ancestral lands and to build those types of policies and procedures. And there's a way that you can actually give funding and money to this land conservancy. What I tend to do in most of my talks is I will do my land acknowledgement and then I'll be like, this is what I'm asking you to do because we are in these spaces and we are sharing our knowledges in this way and I want something to come out of that that is real and focused. I will then say this, I pause and I'm like, so now's my, I'm going to wait until somebody starts to, you can click, like go on your website right now, like get out your phone, like do it right now. and go and donate and say, I'm doing something because I know that I want to show real support. And I tell people that I am at Kutcha Baldy on Twitter, and you can always tweet me a screenshot or a confirmation that you did donate today and let me know, and I will retweet it and tell everyone that you don't just want to acknowledge the land of the people that you are on, you want to support them. and you want to show some real support. So here's one thing that you can do. Now since we're talking about toppling mythologies and monuments, I was very glad that our representative Ramos mentioned the removal of the racial slur from the Washington team's name, that that is happening right now. And when we're talking about mascots, we have to remind ourselves that we are talking about an over 40 plus year fight. to find some way to get people to have this conversation about how we are represented. And throughout the state of California, our K-12 public schools, many of them are represented by tribal mascots and stereotypes, and there is still a lot of work to be done. This map was actually made by the California Indian Cultural Sovereignty Center, which is at Cal State University San Marcos, doing amazing work. And I'm telling people that we need to remember that when we're talking about like the mythologies that we have to get rid of. We're also talking about the fact that we are inundated with those mythologies through things like mascots. And what that teaches our young people is a story about us that isn't told for us or in a way that empowers us. It actually disempowers us. And there have been many scientific studies done to show that representations of Native people through mascots disempowers Native youth so much that it affects their self-esteem, their vision of the future. and their vision of their own peoples. So we need to be the people that make sure that that doesn't continue to happen, especially in the spaces where we teach and where we are from. Because of that, I taught for a while at San Diego State University. I also am an alumni of San Diego State University, and San Diego State University has a Native American mascot. It is time for the Native American mascot at San Diego State University to go. It's way beyond time for them to get rid of that mascot. I have spoken about this on several occasions. There's actually a YouTube video up where I talk about San Diego State's racist mascot. I encourage people on this call today, if you are calling for the taking down of monuments and mythologies and you are looking at a way to help, you can actually write to the president of San Diego State right now and say, it's time to get rid of the mascot. It's time to go. Because they need to be reminded that they don't get to escape this narrative or discussion. And the thing about San Diego State that's fairly interesting is that a lot of San Diego State looks like a mission and is really modeled after a mission. So there's like this whole other layer of how they understand their place in California history. So they've got this mission existence where they look like a mission. They've got an Aztec mascot. And what they're really doing is erasing California Native people from this conversation, from this anything. And I think it's time. So. I encourage you, if you can't donate and you're like, I can't donate, what you can do is write to the president of San Diego State and tell her it is time to get rid of the San Diego State mascot. Those are my two course of actions for you. I hope that you follow up. Again, tweet me if you do. I will retweet you. I'll put it up everywhere. How you participated today. I get to talk today about Nuna Bracera and why his statues are pretty creepy. I don't know if I need to actually explain why. Here's a bunch of pictures of some of them. There you go. I don't know. I feel like this proves the point. Why do we want these statues hanging out everywhere? They're actually real creepy. I have read accounts in the historical records that Yuna Purserra was known for traveling with young Native boys. Also creepy. And then they sort of like put this into statue form and it really kind of it demonstrates for you exactly, I think the kind of story that people are like, hey, we got to actually be critical of this story. We can't sort of take this at face value. There's something else going on. In 2015, the Catholic Church declared Sarah a saint. Pope Francis said that he was the great evangelizer of the West, and that he was for centuries considered a holy man, and that actually the Pope had to waive the Catholic Church's rules to declare him a saint. because he did not have enough miracles on record to be able to be declared a saint. So the Pope at the time waived the rules in order to declare him a saint. The mission mythology is sort of what really informed the Pope's decision, the church's decision, but also other people's decisions about how they were going to approach this subject. We learn specifically about the mission mythology in California through our fourth grade mission project, but also because the mission still exists today. Many of us go and visit them. They're often upheld as sites of knowledge and history, even though what you're viewing is a very sanitized version of what missions would have even looked like. One of the things that people who visited missions in the records talk about is how badly they smelled and how what, like, the smell was overwhelming. And nobody really experiences that in the contemporary mission. I always talk about it as like it's a really like Disneyland version of a mission. It's built in a way to kind of look really inviting, but it doesn't actually capture what it was really like to live there. This happy sort of discussion about the missions was really created from the very beginning of the mission system. You have instances where you really can see Sarah trying to control the mission narrative. He really wants to make sure that he's going to have a place in history, and he does whatever he can to put his place in history. And I think it's important to remember that when we're talking about what California Indians are saying about the mission system, this is also based on historical record. It is also based on the things that we are able to like find in the archives, but also oral histories and narratives, and also a record that might be outside of the Catholic Church's record. And so we're basing it on that too. And Our stories are very different, and the words that we use are things like enslavement, right? And we're talking about what's really happening. So, Junipero Serra, he's the leader of what becomes the mission system in California, and then we turned him into these creepy statues. Very quickly, if you don't know anything about California, what they say is that prior to what we call invasion, There were close to 1 million people in California. It's the largest population north of Mexico. But by 1900, there are less than 20,000 California Indians. So you're talking about a 90% reduction in population between what is the first sort of like building of the missions all the way through the gold rush. You're seeing a constant sort of like the population is up against people trying to kill them, people trying to destroy them, and it causes a 90% reduction in our population. Now, if you're looking at the mission system in California, you're really talking about establishment of 21 missions along the El Camino Real. Many of us probably know them, have visited them, have seen them. I've actually had people who have talked to me about they've done, we're talking about like the way that the missions, the way they're set up now and how they evoke feeling in people. So because they are considered very beautiful or because when you go there, what you're seeing is like a sculpted version of the mission system. you interpret that as how could it possibly be bad to live here because I don't have a bad experience. I actually think of this as kind of a nice place to be. And that's a very cultivated way of teaching history and a very cultivated way of sort of like demeaning what California Indians are saying because you are not allowing people to experience what the mission system truly like, experiencing a kind of mission project of the mission system, a very sanitized view. And again, it's hard for people to stand there and go, oh, it must be really, it must have been really hard to live here because you're not seeing everything about the mission system. Now, what's important and something that I think I always point out when I do talks about the missions is that this system was not just happening in California. And it actually is a part of a system that had been happening since first, like since Columbus first came over, right? 1492. By 1493, they had started establishing missions and churches. And so they're looking at this mission system as the way that they're going to colonize and take and steal the land and take in the people. And what they're also trying to create are like people that will give money to Spain. And so really, you're looking at how can we get people that can become part of this system that will then make money for Spain. So this system has been... perfected over a very long period of time. And when we started in the 1700s in California, we have to remember that for hundreds of years before that, they are already doing this. So they already know. They know Native people aren't just going to show up and be like, thank God you're here. I should join the mission system. They know that Native people are going to protect their religions and ceremonies. They know that Native people are going to resist. And so by the time they get to California, they have been through this system before. They are not naive about what they have to do, which is why they immediately set up things like going into villages and kidnapping women and children, right? Running people off their lands and making them go into the mission systems. making it impossible for them to get at food so that they're starving and have to come to the missions. They've perfected this system. Another thing to keep in mind, which I always like to tell people, is during this same period of time that they're setting up the mission system, they're also doing the Spanish Inquisition in Spain. And when we think about what the Spanish Inquisition was and what we've learned about it, we know that it was an incredibly violent system that was about how people practice their religions. It was going after certain groups of people, and it was publicly punishing them, trying to get them to admit that they weren't Catholic enough. And so I always say to people, if they're willing to treat like some of their own citizens like this, why do we assume they come over here and are so nice to Indian people? That's a false narrative. We know what was going on during this period of time with Spanish, the torture devices that they did during the Inquisition. And they're doing that sometimes to their own citizens. So for us to think that they come over here in a very peaceful way is incredibly naive. And we have to remember that. The Mission San Diego is established on July 16th, 1769. And then by 1775, you have one of the first revolts of California Indians, the Kumeyaay Revolt. I just want you to keep that in mind because I'm going to tell you a little story about it. Now, the thing about the Inquisition and the reason I mentioned it. is that Father Serra was actually a part of the Spanish Inquisition. He was named Inquisitor when he came to the Americas. So in 1752, when he visited Mexico City, he sent a request asking to be an Inquisitor. He was actually named the official Inquisitor for the entire region, where he could operate as an Inquisitor if no other Inquisitor was there. And he started to file these reports as Inquisitor. One included a report where he was convinced that Indian women were practicing witches and that they were doing witchcraft. He actually did a report where he said that he knew that Native women were turning into like bats and birds and flying around with each other. So he's not, I mean, he doesn't have a great view of what's happening, but he really targets Native women because they, at the time, are medicine women. They are some of the leaders. They are the people that... their warriors go to for advice. And so he looks at Native women as like a real threat to what he wants to do with the Spanish mission system. And he does not like that Indian people are very clear that women have a very important role in their culture, in their politics, in how they negotiate. And so he starts to really target, especially Native medicine women, who are some of the most important leaders in their tribes. And so that's something to also keep in mind. He is part of this inquisition. When you're thinking about what the Spanish Inquisition is, know that it was also happening over here in the Americas. Now, he also wrote extensively about what was happening at the time. And so he like tells people what's going on. So when you say like, oh, I always heard the mission system was a nice place to be. Well, the guy that's actually running it is also writing about how messed up it is. And so some of the things we're getting are actually from him. And here's one of his more famous quotes where he says, clever as they are at lassoing cows and mules, soldiers would catch an Indian woman with their lassos to become prey for their unbridled lust. At times, some Indian men would try to defend their wives only to be shot down with bullets. Even the children who came to the mission were not safe from their baseness. So he's reporting on what is really going on, but he is not stopping it. And he, um, He turns a blind eye often, and that's one of the things that Native people complain about when they go to testify, is they're like, nobody's doing anything, but you know that this is happening to us. When we think about the men of their time argument with Sarah, it's one of the things that comes up a lot, and I recognize that, like, Deborah Miranda and others were able to talk about this. I want to mention it again. If he's a man of his time, then we have to remember all the other men of their time that were saying, this is not a good thing. Why are we ignoring those men of their time? Are they men like ahead of their time? I always say, are they like men of the future? Right? Because they're talking about this like this is not okay. So here you have a quote from a Russian otter hunter who stayed at the missions where he talks about Indians being bound in rawhide ropes and bleeding from their wounds and children tied to their mothers. and that some of the men who were runaway were tied on sticks and beaten with straps. You also have men of their time, so men of Junipero Serra's time, who are... of the mission system writing about how messed up the mission system is. Padre Antonio writes about the treatments of the Indians and saying they're receiving heavy floggings, are shackled, put in stocks, treated with so much cruelty. So these are both men of... You know, bro, Sarah's time. And I always say, if we're going to, if we can't, if everybody's telling us you can't judge him by the standards of our time, well, you can judge him by the standards of his own time. Here you go. They are saying he's not doing a good thing. They're trying to report it. You also have then what happens with California Indians. So the other people at the time that knew that this was really messed up were California Indian people. And why don't we get to be people of the time who are saying we shouldn't be doing this? And one way you know that they don't agree with what's happening to them is there are a number of revolts against the mission system, which we don't often learn about. So you've got 1775, where the Kumeyaay peoples, they actually burn the San Diego mission to the ground. 1781, the Ketchin Revolt. 1785, the Tongva and Toyperina lead a revolution against the mission San Gabriel. 1812, the natives in Santa Cruz kill Father Quintana. So this is a constant motion of this system. They are always resisting. And that shows you that at the time they knew that this is not something that should be happening to them. Now, it's very important for us to mention Toy Perina because when people sort of think about, like, what does it mean to have these monuments and statues? We have monuments and statues to Father Sarah. We do not have monuments and statues to Toy Perina. And that tells you everything you need to know about what they think about history. We need to uphold, uplift Sarah, who does really awful things and is part of a system that is trying to destroy Californian people and steal their land. And then you have Toy Purina, who's resisting that system and who is actually one of a really foundational part of California, the state's history. And yet she doesn't get statues and she doesn't get like sort of people putting her up. Right. So the important thing to know about Toy Purina, if you don't, she is a Tongva medicine woman. She was born in 1760. She led a revolt against the mission San Gabriel, where she brought together multiple villages and had them fight together. And this is something that is very important to think about. Like she's bringing people together as the medicine person. And she attempts a revolt against the mission San Gabriel and is thwarted by a soldier. And who turns her in. So in the end, they get caught. They have to go to trial. And she gets exiled to Mission Carmel. And then she dies at Mission San Juan Bautista at the age of 39. She is a foundational part of California history because not only would she become like a really important representation of what happens to California Indians when we come together and the things that we can do. But also the man who thwarted her efforts was named Jose Maria Pico. He would later go on to become one of the wealthiest men in Spanish California because of what he did to. turn in Toyperina, they awarded him with the ability to own land. And because of that, he turns around and it becomes one of the wealthiest landowners. And then his children turn around and become some of the biggest players in what becomes Mexican California and the rancho system in Southern California. And that was off the backs of turning in Toyperina during this revolution. So had he not been able to do that, he may not have been able to be rewarded with land. So you see how like on the backs of California Indians and California Indian people, this is how you build some of the biggest land-owning families at the time, who caused some of the worst pain because they start to displace native peoples from their regions, especially in San Diego, where they have these large rancho systems that push them out because of it. But it's important, even though we don't have these kind of official monuments to people like Marina, The people on the ground, all of us that are doing this work as grassroots activists, we can. We can build our monuments. We can make things happen. And so what you see, especially in the L.A. area, because that's where the Tongva are, you see monuments to her. You see murals. You see examples of people saying, like, let's talk about Toy Perina. That's who we should know about. That's who we should learn about. And these are really important examples of what we can do as Native people to say this is what it means when we start to tell history in this way. Now, what I love is that when Sarah became a saint, somebody, I don't know who, went around and started posting up signs over any street that was named Sarah Way, Sarah Street, Sarah Road. They instead put Toyperina over that. And they were like, we should have Toyperina Street, Toyperina Way, Toyperina Road. And I love this as a way to say this is what we have to do. And when we rename, it looks like this. And that to me was a really powerful moment. Which brings me here. So in fourth grade, you have to do a Spanish mission project in California. And a lot of the times people tell me about kind of like what they expect with the Spanish mission project. There's a lot of common narratives that people learn about the missions before they have to do this project. When my daughter was in the fourth grade, she would come home and say, this is what we're learning about the missions. And my job was to be like, nah, really, it's about this, right? Like the Spanish brought agriculture to Native Americans. They did not. The natives came to the missions because they were starving. We had lots of food. The Spanish wanted to convert them to Catholicism. Well, they kind of did, but what they really wanted was slave labor, right? So it's like talking about how we push back against these narratives. What I think is really important about the California Mission Project is they actually have you build a mission, usually, or do some type of project that you have to learn about the missions. And when it came time for my daughter in the fourth grade to learn about the missions, my job was to try to figure out what we were going to do. Because generally what they have you do is build a mission. You got to talk a lot about the bells. They got a thing about bells. They always ask you like, what's the importance of the bells? Tell us about the bells, right? You got to talk a lot about architecture and how important the architecture is to California. And you got to talk about like what they did there. And a lot of that's like gardening, right? Or chores or wineries, that sort of thing. You can actually go during most of the seasons in California when it's available. You can go to Michael's and actually buy. a Missions of California set. If you're lazy and you don't want to do it, right, you can be like, I'll just buy the mission set. And it actually will come with tiny little like padres and Indians and tiny little Indian babies that you can have the padres holding while the Indians are gardening. It's messed up, but you can go buy it. And that's one of the ways that we get this idea of like what the mission project is supposed to be. My daughter's mission project was very different. I told her that the only way that she could do it is if We built the Kumeyaay mission and she told them about the Kumeyaay revolt and she then built it and set it on fire because that would be historically accurate that they had showed up and set it on fire. I was like, and then we'll turn in the charred remnants of your mission project. And I will say that is historically accurate and we'll call it a day. Her teacher was like, I can't let you burn it. You have to turn in something to me. So instead she built the mission and she put flames all over it. Because she wanted to show it on fire. And she wanted to show people tearing it down. And then she had to answer certain questions in a mission report. Some of the questions were things like, how did the Spanish influence the structure of the mission? Or why is the mission important to California history? And I did not help her write this report. So the report is available on my blog if you want to read the whole thing. But I want you to know, I did not help her write it. She wrote it all by herself. And one of the things that I liked is the way she flipped. a lot of those discussions. And really when they asked her those questions, she would write something very different. So she would say things like, the mission is important to California history because it was the first mission built in California. Six years after they built the mission, the Native Americans were tired of being treated badly by the priests and they set the mission on fire and led a revolt. This is important to California history because it shows that Native Americans were fighting against the mission system from the very beginning. And that's how she flipped. like the things that she thought that they wanted to hear. In the end, she talks about how the Kumeyaay are still alive today, that they are proud of their resistance, that there were lots of bad things that happened. And then she said, a lot of the Kumeyaay were mad and scared and decided to revolt. On November 4th, 1775, the Kumeyaay set the mission on fire and tore apart the chapel. The whole mission was burned to the ground, but after that, the Spanish rebuilt it. And then she put in parentheses, sadly, which I actually really appreciate. So she pushed back against this a lot. And I will tell you this, as a mom, as a Californian woman, when I went to her and I said, you know, sometimes people tell me they can't teach this real history to you in the fourth grade or in the fifth grade or in the third grade because you can't handle it. Did it make you sad? Was it hard? And she was like, no. What it taught me is that Californians are really strong people. And they did so much. And they were so important. And it made me feel good. about Indian people and what they did. And I realized there that we teach a curriculum in this state that disempowers California Indian youth, that teaches them that somehow they don't have what they need to succeed, that tells them that their historical narratives are about being destroyed or that they weren't as important or as smart as other people. And when she learned something different, she was empowered by that history. And I would like to encourage everyone to keep that in mind. Because when we are toppling mission monuments and we are toppling statues, we are talking about our hundreds of years of resistance. And we're saying this narrative has to become about us, our presence, our futures, who we're going to be, how we can build coalitions, and what this is going to look like for decolonized futures. And I'll tell you this, we're not done with a single statue. We're just getting started. with a statue. So thank you everyone.

She received her PhD in Native American Studies with a designated emphasis in feminist theory and research from the University of California, Davis, and her Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Literary Research from San Diego State University. Her research focuses on California Indians, Indigenous feminisms, social environmental justice, and decolonization. Her first book, We Are Dancing For You, Native Feminism and the Revitalization of Women Coming of Age Ceremonies, addresses gender inequality and gender violence within Native communities.

In 2007, she co-founded the Native Women's Collective, a non-profit organization that supports the continued... Revitalization of Native American Arts and Culture. Dr. Rizalene Boldy, thank you.

Thank you so much for that great introduction. I am going to share my screen also so I can share a presentation. Just give me one minute.

So I decided to title the presentation today, universal accessories are hella creepy This is kind of where I'm at in my thinking about how to like talk to people specifically about this issue and what's going on right now. I'm going to talk a little bit about toppling the fourth grade California Mission Project, the rewriting and rewriting of history. But I do want to begin today with a land acknowledgement.

So I am fortunate enough to be a professor here in my home territory near the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. Right now I am joining you from Wiat land near Padua which is the Mad River. I'm in McKinleyville and the Wiat peoples are very near and dear to my heart and I appreciate all the work that they are doing throughout this region to be able to work on decolonization and land return. And we are celebrating here in our area the return of land to indigenous peoples, the return of a sacred site from the city of Eureka to the Wiat tribe just this past year. So I think that we're seeing really amazing things happening throughout the state of California that we should always honor.

But because I also spent some time in San Diego, both to get my master's degree, but also as a professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State. I did also want to begin today because when I do land acknowledgments, it's very important to me that I don't just tell you about the people, but that I give you some. course of action that I'm asking you to do as part of my land acknowledgement, because I don't think that land acknowledgements work unless we are compelling people towards something.

We shouldn't just be acknowledging peoples. We should be saying how people can actually support, center, and bring forward Indigenous issues in a really meaningful way, because that's what a land acknowledgement is supposed to be for. So I needed to give you some things that you could do today as part of my land acknowledgement.

The first is I'm asking people on the call if they will donate to the Kumeyaay to Gain Your Land Conservancy. This is actually the link if you would like to donate. This allows you to help the conservancy to protect ancestral lands, to further get ancestral lands in the Kumeyaay area, to manage ancestral lands and to build those types of policies and procedures.

And there's a way that you can actually give funding and money to this land conservancy. What I tend to do in most of my talks is I will do my land acknowledgement and then I'll be like, this is what I'm asking you to do because we are in these spaces and we are sharing our knowledges in this way and I want something to come out of that that is real and focused. I will then say this, I pause and I'm like, so now's my, I'm going to wait until somebody starts to, you can click, like go on your website right now, like get out your phone, like do it right now.

and go and donate and say, I'm doing something because I know that I want to show real support. And I tell people that I am at Kutcha Baldy on Twitter, and you can always tweet me a screenshot or a confirmation that you did donate today and let me know, and I will retweet it and tell everyone that you don't just want to acknowledge the land of the people that you are on, you want to support them. and you want to show some real support. So here's one thing that you can do.

Now since we're talking about toppling mythologies and monuments, I was very glad that our representative Ramos mentioned the removal of the racial slur from the Washington team's name, that that is happening right now. And when we're talking about mascots, we have to remind ourselves that we are talking about an over 40 plus year fight. to find some way to get people to have this conversation about how we are represented. And throughout the state of California, our K-12 public schools, many of them are represented by tribal mascots and stereotypes, and there is still a lot of work to be done. This map was actually made by the California Indian Cultural Sovereignty Center, which is at Cal State University San Marcos, doing amazing work.

And I'm telling people that we need to remember that when we're talking about like the mythologies that we have to get rid of. We're also talking about the fact that we are inundated with those mythologies through things like mascots. And what that teaches our young people is a story about us that isn't told for us or in a way that empowers us.

It actually disempowers us. And there have been many scientific studies done to show that representations of Native people through mascots disempowers Native youth so much that it affects their self-esteem, their vision of the future. and their vision of their own peoples.

So we need to be the people that make sure that that doesn't continue to happen, especially in the spaces where we teach and where we are from. Because of that, I taught for a while at San Diego State University. I also am an alumni of San Diego State University, and San Diego State University has a Native American mascot.

It is time for the Native American mascot at San Diego State University to go. It's way beyond time for them to get rid of that mascot. I have spoken about this on several occasions.

There's actually a YouTube video up where I talk about San Diego State's racist mascot. I encourage people on this call today, if you are calling for the taking down of monuments and mythologies and you are looking at a way to help, you can actually write to the president of San Diego State right now and say, it's time to get rid of the mascot. It's time to go. Because they need to be reminded that they don't get to escape this narrative or discussion.

And the thing about San Diego State that's fairly interesting is that a lot of San Diego State looks like a mission and is really modeled after a mission. So there's like this whole other layer of how they understand their place in California history. So they've got this mission existence where they look like a mission. They've got an Aztec mascot.

And what they're really doing is erasing California Native people from this conversation, from this anything. And I think it's time. So. I encourage you, if you can't donate and you're like, I can't donate, what you can do is write to the president of San Diego State and tell her it is time to get rid of the San Diego State mascot. Those are my two course of actions for you.

I hope that you follow up. Again, tweet me if you do. I will retweet you.

I'll put it up everywhere. How you participated today. I get to talk today about Nuna Bracera and why his statues are pretty creepy.

I don't know if I need to actually explain why. Here's a bunch of pictures of some of them. There you go.

I don't know. I feel like this proves the point. Why do we want these statues hanging out everywhere? They're actually real creepy. I have read accounts in the historical records that Yuna Purserra was known for traveling with young Native boys.

Also creepy. And then they sort of like put this into statue form and it really kind of it demonstrates for you exactly, I think the kind of story that people are like, hey, we got to actually be critical of this story. We can't sort of take this at face value.

There's something else going on. In 2015, the Catholic Church declared Sarah a saint. Pope Francis said that he was the great evangelizer of the West, and that he was for centuries considered a holy man, and that actually the Pope had to waive the Catholic Church's rules to declare him a saint. because he did not have enough miracles on record to be able to be declared a saint. So the Pope at the time waived the rules in order to declare him a saint.

The mission mythology is sort of what really informed the Pope's decision, the church's decision, but also other people's decisions about how they were going to approach this subject. We learn specifically about the mission mythology in California through our fourth grade mission project, but also because the mission still exists today. Many of us go and visit them. They're often upheld as sites of knowledge and history, even though what you're viewing is a very sanitized version of what missions would have even looked like.

One of the things that people who visited missions in the records talk about is how badly they smelled and how what, like, the smell was overwhelming. And nobody really experiences that in the contemporary mission. I always talk about it as like it's a really like Disneyland version of a mission. It's built in a way to kind of look really inviting, but it doesn't actually capture what it was really like to live there. This happy sort of discussion about the missions was really created from the very beginning of the mission system.

You have instances where you really can see Sarah trying to control the mission narrative. He really wants to make sure that he's going to have a place in history, and he does whatever he can to put his place in history. And I think it's important to remember that when we're talking about what California Indians are saying about the mission system, this is also based on historical record. It is also based on the things that we are able to like find in the archives, but also oral histories and narratives, and also a record that might be outside of the Catholic Church's record. And so we're basing it on that too.

And Our stories are very different, and the words that we use are things like enslavement, right? And we're talking about what's really happening. So, Junipero Serra, he's the leader of what becomes the mission system in California, and then we turned him into these creepy statues. Very quickly, if you don't know anything about California, what they say is that prior to what we call invasion, There were close to 1 million people in California. It's the largest population north of Mexico.

But by 1900, there are less than 20,000 California Indians. So you're talking about a 90% reduction in population between what is the first sort of like building of the missions all the way through the gold rush. You're seeing a constant sort of like the population is up against people trying to kill them, people trying to destroy them, and it causes a 90% reduction in our population.

Now, if you're looking at the mission system in California, you're really talking about establishment of 21 missions along the El Camino Real. Many of us probably know them, have visited them, have seen them. I've actually had people who have talked to me about they've done, we're talking about like the way that the missions, the way they're set up now and how they evoke feeling in people. So because they are considered very beautiful or because when you go there, what you're seeing is like a sculpted version of the mission system.

you interpret that as how could it possibly be bad to live here because I don't have a bad experience. I actually think of this as kind of a nice place to be. And that's a very cultivated way of teaching history and a very cultivated way of sort of like demeaning what California Indians are saying because you are not allowing people to experience what the mission system truly like, experiencing a kind of mission project of the mission system, a very sanitized view.

And again, it's hard for people to stand there and go, oh, it must be really, it must have been really hard to live here because you're not seeing everything about the mission system. Now, what's important and something that I think I always point out when I do talks about the missions is that this system was not just happening in California. And it actually is a part of a system that had been happening since first, like since Columbus first came over, right?

1492. By 1493, they had started establishing missions and churches. And so they're looking at this mission system as the way that they're going to colonize and take and steal the land and take in the people. And what they're also trying to create are like people that will give money to Spain.

And so really, you're looking at how can we get people that can become part of this system that will then make money for Spain. So this system has been... perfected over a very long period of time. And when we started in the 1700s in California, we have to remember that for hundreds of years before that, they are already doing this.

So they already know. They know Native people aren't just going to show up and be like, thank God you're here. I should join the mission system.

They know that Native people are going to protect their religions and ceremonies. They know that Native people are going to resist. And so by the time they get to California, they have been through this system before. They are not naive about what they have to do, which is why they immediately set up things like going into villages and kidnapping women and children, right? Running people off their lands and making them go into the mission systems.

making it impossible for them to get at food so that they're starving and have to come to the missions. They've perfected this system. Another thing to keep in mind, which I always like to tell people, is during this same period of time that they're setting up the mission system, they're also doing the Spanish Inquisition in Spain.

And when we think about what the Spanish Inquisition was and what we've learned about it, we know that it was an incredibly violent system that was about how people practice their religions. It was going after certain groups of people, and it was publicly punishing them, trying to get them to admit that they weren't Catholic enough. And so I always say to people, if they're willing to treat like some of their own citizens like this, why do we assume they come over here and are so nice to Indian people? That's a false narrative. We know what was going on during this period of time with Spanish, the torture devices that they did during the Inquisition.

And they're doing that sometimes to their own citizens. So for us to think that they come over here in a very peaceful way is incredibly naive. And we have to remember that.

The Mission San Diego is established on July 16th, 1769. And then by 1775, you have one of the first revolts of California Indians, the Kumeyaay Revolt. I just want you to keep that in mind because I'm going to tell you a little story about it. Now, the thing about the Inquisition and the reason I mentioned it. is that Father Serra was actually a part of the Spanish Inquisition.

He was named Inquisitor when he came to the Americas. So in 1752, when he visited Mexico City, he sent a request asking to be an Inquisitor. He was actually named the official Inquisitor for the entire region, where he could operate as an Inquisitor if no other Inquisitor was there. And he started to file these reports as Inquisitor.

One included a report where he was convinced that Indian women were practicing witches and that they were doing witchcraft. He actually did a report where he said that he knew that Native women were turning into like bats and birds and flying around with each other. So he's not, I mean, he doesn't have a great view of what's happening, but he really targets Native women because they, at the time, are medicine women. They are some of the leaders. They are the people that...

their warriors go to for advice. And so he looks at Native women as like a real threat to what he wants to do with the Spanish mission system. And he does not like that Indian people are very clear that women have a very important role in their culture, in their politics, in how they negotiate. And so he starts to really target, especially Native medicine women, who are some of the most important leaders in their tribes.

And so that's something to also keep in mind. He is part of this inquisition. When you're thinking about what the Spanish Inquisition is, know that it was also happening over here in the Americas. Now, he also wrote extensively about what was happening at the time. And so he like tells people what's going on.

So when you say like, oh, I always heard the mission system was a nice place to be. Well, the guy that's actually running it is also writing about how messed up it is. And so some of the things we're getting are actually from him. And here's one of his more famous quotes where he says, clever as they are at lassoing cows and mules, soldiers would catch an Indian woman with their lassos to become prey for their unbridled lust.

At times, some Indian men would try to defend their wives only to be shot down with bullets. Even the children who came to the mission were not safe from their baseness. So he's reporting on what is really going on, but he is not stopping it.

And he, um, He turns a blind eye often, and that's one of the things that Native people complain about when they go to testify, is they're like, nobody's doing anything, but you know that this is happening to us. When we think about the men of their time argument with Sarah, it's one of the things that comes up a lot, and I recognize that, like, Deborah Miranda and others were able to talk about this. I want to mention it again.

If he's a man of his time, then we have to remember all the other men of their time that were saying, this is not a good thing. Why are we ignoring those men of their time? Are they men like ahead of their time?

I always say, are they like men of the future? Right? Because they're talking about this like this is not okay.

So here you have a quote from a Russian otter hunter who stayed at the missions where he talks about Indians being bound in rawhide ropes and bleeding from their wounds and children tied to their mothers. and that some of the men who were runaway were tied on sticks and beaten with straps. You also have men of their time, so men of Junipero Serra's time, who are... of the mission system writing about how messed up the mission system is.

Padre Antonio writes about the treatments of the Indians and saying they're receiving heavy floggings, are shackled, put in stocks, treated with so much cruelty. So these are both men of... You know, bro, Sarah's time. And I always say, if we're going to, if we can't, if everybody's telling us you can't judge him by the standards of our time, well, you can judge him by the standards of his own time.

Here you go. They are saying he's not doing a good thing. They're trying to report it. You also have then what happens with California Indians. So the other people at the time that knew that this was really messed up were California Indian people.

And why don't we get to be people of the time who are saying we shouldn't be doing this? And one way you know that they don't agree with what's happening to them is there are a number of revolts against the mission system, which we don't often learn about. So you've got 1775, where the Kumeyaay peoples, they actually burn the San Diego mission to the ground.

1781, the Ketchin Revolt. 1785, the Tongva and Toyperina lead a revolution against the mission San Gabriel. 1812, the natives in Santa Cruz kill Father Quintana.

So this is a constant motion of this system. They are always resisting. And that shows you that at the time they knew that this is not something that should be happening to them. Now, it's very important for us to mention Toy Perina because when people sort of think about, like, what does it mean to have these monuments and statues?

We have monuments and statues to Father Sarah. We do not have monuments and statues to Toy Perina. And that tells you everything you need to know about what they think about history.

We need to uphold, uplift Sarah, who does really awful things and is part of a system that is trying to destroy Californian people and steal their land. And then you have Toy Purina, who's resisting that system and who is actually one of a really foundational part of California, the state's history. And yet she doesn't get statues and she doesn't get like sort of people putting her up. Right. So the important thing to know about Toy Purina, if you don't, she is a Tongva medicine woman.

She was born in 1760. She led a revolt against the mission San Gabriel, where she brought together multiple villages and had them fight together. And this is something that is very important to think about. Like she's bringing people together as the medicine person. And she attempts a revolt against the mission San Gabriel and is thwarted by a soldier.

And who turns her in. So in the end, they get caught. They have to go to trial.

And she gets exiled to Mission Carmel. And then she dies at Mission San Juan Bautista at the age of 39. She is a foundational part of California history because not only would she become like a really important representation of what happens to California Indians when we come together and the things that we can do. But also the man who thwarted her efforts was named Jose Maria Pico.

He would later go on to become one of the wealthiest men in Spanish California because of what he did to. turn in Toyperina, they awarded him with the ability to own land. And because of that, he turns around and it becomes one of the wealthiest landowners. And then his children turn around and become some of the biggest players in what becomes Mexican California and the rancho system in Southern California. And that was off the backs of turning in Toyperina during this revolution.

So had he not been able to do that, he may not have been able to be rewarded with land. So you see how like on the backs of California Indians and California Indian people, this is how you build some of the biggest land-owning families at the time, who caused some of the worst pain because they start to displace native peoples from their regions, especially in San Diego, where they have these large rancho systems that push them out because of it. But it's important, even though we don't have these kind of official monuments to people like Marina, The people on the ground, all of us that are doing this work as grassroots activists, we can.

We can build our monuments. We can make things happen. And so what you see, especially in the L.A.

area, because that's where the Tongva are, you see monuments to her. You see murals. You see examples of people saying, like, let's talk about Toy Perina.

That's who we should know about. That's who we should learn about. And these are really important examples of what we can do as Native people to say this is what it means when we start to tell history in this way.

Now, what I love is that when Sarah became a saint, somebody, I don't know who, went around and started posting up signs over any street that was named Sarah Way, Sarah Street, Sarah Road. They instead put Toyperina over that. And they were like, we should have Toyperina Street, Toyperina Way, Toyperina Road.

And I love this as a way to say this is what we have to do. And when we rename, it looks like this. And that to me was a really powerful moment.

Which brings me here. So in fourth grade, you have to do a Spanish mission project in California. And a lot of the times people tell me about kind of like what they expect with the Spanish mission project.

There's a lot of common narratives that people learn about the missions before they have to do this project. When my daughter was in the fourth grade, she would come home and say, this is what we're learning about the missions. And my job was to be like, nah, really, it's about this, right? Like the Spanish brought agriculture to Native Americans.

They did not. The natives came to the missions because they were starving. We had lots of food.

The Spanish wanted to convert them to Catholicism. Well, they kind of did, but what they really wanted was slave labor, right? So it's like talking about how we push back against these narratives.

What I think is really important about the California Mission Project is they actually have you build a mission, usually, or do some type of project that you have to learn about the missions. And when it came time for my daughter in the fourth grade to learn about the missions, my job was to try to figure out what we were going to do. Because generally what they have you do is build a mission.

You got to talk a lot about the bells. They got a thing about bells. They always ask you like, what's the importance of the bells? Tell us about the bells, right? You got to talk a lot about architecture and how important the architecture is to California.

And you got to talk about like what they did there. And a lot of that's like gardening, right? Or chores or wineries, that sort of thing. You can actually go during most of the seasons in California when it's available. You can go to Michael's and actually buy.

a Missions of California set. If you're lazy and you don't want to do it, right, you can be like, I'll just buy the mission set. And it actually will come with tiny little like padres and Indians and tiny little Indian babies that you can have the padres holding while the Indians are gardening. It's messed up, but you can go buy it. And that's one of the ways that we get this idea of like what the mission project is supposed to be.

My daughter's mission project was very different. I told her that the only way that she could do it is if We built the Kumeyaay mission and she told them about the Kumeyaay revolt and she then built it and set it on fire because that would be historically accurate that they had showed up and set it on fire. I was like, and then we'll turn in the charred remnants of your mission project. And I will say that is historically accurate and we'll call it a day. Her teacher was like, I can't let you burn it.

You have to turn in something to me. So instead she built the mission and she put flames all over it. Because she wanted to show it on fire.

And she wanted to show people tearing it down. And then she had to answer certain questions in a mission report. Some of the questions were things like, how did the Spanish influence the structure of the mission? Or why is the mission important to California history?

And I did not help her write this report. So the report is available on my blog if you want to read the whole thing. But I want you to know, I did not help her write it.

She wrote it all by herself. And one of the things that I liked is the way she flipped. a lot of those discussions.

And really when they asked her those questions, she would write something very different. So she would say things like, the mission is important to California history because it was the first mission built in California. Six years after they built the mission, the Native Americans were tired of being treated badly by the priests and they set the mission on fire and led a revolt.

This is important to California history because it shows that Native Americans were fighting against the mission system from the very beginning. And that's how she flipped. like the things that she thought that they wanted to hear.

In the end, she talks about how the Kumeyaay are still alive today, that they are proud of their resistance, that there were lots of bad things that happened. And then she said, a lot of the Kumeyaay were mad and scared and decided to revolt. On November 4th, 1775, the Kumeyaay set the mission on fire and tore apart the chapel. The whole mission was burned to the ground, but after that, the Spanish rebuilt it.

And then she put in parentheses, sadly, which I actually really appreciate. So she pushed back against this a lot. And I will tell you this, as a mom, as a Californian woman, when I went to her and I said, you know, sometimes people tell me they can't teach this real history to you in the fourth grade or in the fifth grade or in the third grade because you can't handle it.

Did it make you sad? Was it hard? And she was like, no.

What it taught me is that Californians are really strong people. And they did so much. And they were so important. And it made me feel good.

about Indian people and what they did. And I realized there that we teach a curriculum in this state that disempowers California Indian youth, that teaches them that somehow they don't have what they need to succeed, that tells them that their historical narratives are about being destroyed or that they weren't as important or as smart as other people. And when she learned something different, she was empowered by that history.

And I would like to encourage everyone to keep that in mind. Because when we are toppling mission monuments and we are toppling statues, we are talking about our hundreds of years of resistance. And we're saying this narrative has to become about us, our presence, our futures, who we're going to be, how we can build coalitions, and what this is going to look like for decolonized futures. And I'll tell you this, we're not done with a single statue.

We're just getting started. with a statue. So thank you everyone.

Transcript for:Decolonizing California Native Histories

Transcript for:
Decolonizing California Native Histories