Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis

Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769 - 1850

Bibliographic Data

ID2785842
AuthorsChristopher Vecsey (Colgate University, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume86
Issue4
Pages827-828
Publication date2006-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2006-062
OpenAlexW2087547876
LanguageEN
Citations received12

A decade ago, when I published On the Padres’ Trail (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1997), the first volume of three regarding the history of Indian Catholics in North America, I thought that I had touched sufficient bases of evidence concerning the Franciscan missions of Alta California, 1769 – 1850. Steven W. Hackel’s new book shows how much more there was to read, and how much has been written on the topic in the last ten years. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis is an impressive feat of historical documentation and deserves applause. It is all the more impressive for its reasoned tone, a change from the “highly polemical scholarship on the missions of colonial California” (p. vii). Focusing on Mission San Carlos Borromeo but including data from many of the missions, Hackel employs statistical tables and copious footnotes instead of rhetorical flourishes in examining the many dimensions of Indian existence through the revolutions wrought by the Spaniards.Those revolutions were not marked by military conquest but rather by incremental yet dramatic “ecological change” and “demographic collapse” (p. 65). Hackel investigates the economic, social, political, and cultural ramifications of those revolutions, from the arrival of the Spaniards and the foundation of the missions in the eighteenth century through secularization and disintegration in the nineteenth.Punishment, fugitivism, disease, population decline — these topics have elicited strong reactions from scholars and others who have studied the missions’ effects on Indians. Hackel treats them with complex care. His responses to controversial works are contained quietly and diplomatically in footnotes.Is Hackel sometimes too careful in the questions he asks? There is no discussion about sexual relations between Franciscan missionaries and Indians, despite a whole chapter on marriage and sexuality. Were the missionaries celibate? Was there any truth to the rumor that Fray Blas Ordaz fathered several children during the 1830s, including one Vicente Ordaz, whom Fray Blas himself baptized at Santa Ynez? Hackel might have made some mention of this possibility, if only to disprove it. And what of slavery? One of the persistent questions about the mission system has been whether it constituted a form of slavery. Hackel calls the Indians’ mission labor “oppressive” (p. 273), conducted “against their wills” (p. 272), and controlled by Franciscan “violence, intimidation, and coercion” (p. 281); however, he denies that Indians were “enslaved” (p. 281). His judgment might be correct, but he does not analyze what might constitute “slavery” (p. 288, the only place I can find this word in the entire book). Hackel is not shy about using strong language to describe Franciscan behavior. He states, for instance, that “all mission Indians lived under the threat of Spanish violence, and, in time, many who flouted the padres’ plans found themselves imprisoned, flogged, hobbled, or forced to do labor” (p. 321). Why not, then, a more thorough consideration of slavery?Although Hackel does very well at examining the missionaries’ goals, he demurs at addressing the “ultimately inscrutable issue of California Indians’ receptivity to the intricacies of Catholic doctrine” (p. 9). Hackel is not above speculating about other aspects of Indians’ inner life. His prose is rich in “perhaps,” “no doubt,” “would have,” “must have,” “might have,” “it seems,” “surely,” “probably,” “one imagines,” “doubtless,” “it is easy to imagine,” and the like. Why not more about the spiritual effects of religious institutions? Indian accommodations to the Catholic faith, I would argue from experience, have been less inscrutable than Hackel suggests.For all its wealth of documentation, Hackel’s book offers little that might change the way scholars understand mission Indian experiences. What we learn here is not so different from what we already knew, only now our knowledge is far better supported by evidence. For example, I would suggest that Sherburne F. Cook’s pathbreaking 1976 work, The Conflict between the California Indian and White Civilization (Univ. of California Press), still holds its own, especially its depiction of the missions as loci of rampant death.Finally, Hackel hopes in this extensive work “to break down the boundaries” between Latin American and early American history (p. 5). I suggest, rather, that his book shows how different California was from English, Dutch, Russian, and French colonies before 1850, because (as he shows) the mission was the main institution of colonial contact for Indians in California. At the close of the missionary era, as the Americans took over, the worst revolution was about to come. For whatever legalisms the Spaniards employed in their exploitation of Indians, the Americans possessed little in the way of conscience. Genocide was to become the rule of California in the 1850s

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