Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of mission enterprises and how native peoples actively incorporated Spanish colonialism into their own landscapes. An innovative reorientation spanning the northern limits of Spanish colonialism, this volume brings together a variety of archaeologists focused on placing indigenous agency in the foreground of mission interpretation.

Recovering lost voices and exploring issues intimate and institutional, this sweeping examination of Spanish California illuminates Indian struggles against a confining colonial order and amidst harrowing depopulation. To capture the enormous challenges Indians confronted, Steven W. Hackel integrates textual and quantitative sources and weaves together analyses of disease and depopulation, marriage and sexuality, crime and punishment, and religious, economic, and political change. As colonization reduced their numbers and remade California, Indians congregated in missions, where they forged communities under Franciscan oversight. Yet missions proved disastrously unhealthful and coercive, as Franciscans sought control over Indians' beliefs and instituted unfamiliar systems of labor and punishment. Even so, remnants of Indian groups still survived when Mexican officials ended Franciscan rule in the 1830s. Many regained land and found strength in ancestral cultures that predated the Spaniards' arrival. At this study's heart are the dynamic interactions in and around Mission San Carlos Borromeo between Monterey region Indians (the Children of Coyote) and Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and settlers. Hackel places these local developments in the context of the California mission system and draws comparisons between California and other areas of the Spanish Borderlands and colonial America. Concentrating on the experiences of the Costanoan and Esselen peoples during the colonial period, Children of Coyote concludes with an epilogue that carries the story of their survival to the present day.

This book is a compelling and balanced history of the California missions and their impact on the Indians they tried to convert. Focusing primarily on the religious conflict between the two groups, it sheds new light on the tensions, accomplishments, and limitations of the California mission experience. James A. Sandos, an eminent authority on the American West, traces the history of the Franciscan missions from the creation of the first one in 1769 until they were turned over to the public in 1836. Addressing such topics as the singular theology of the missions, the role of music in bonding Indians to Franciscan enterprises, the diseases caused by contact with the missions, and the Indian resistance to missionary activity, Sandos not only describes what happened in the California missions but offers a persuasive explanation for why it happened.

A Cross of Thorns reexamines a chapter of California history that has been largely forgotten -- the enslavement of California's Indian population by Spanish missionaries from 1769 to 1821. California's Spanish missions are one of the state's major tourist attractions, where visitors are told that peaceful cultural exchange occurred between Franciscan friars and California Indians.

Originally published in 1952 and then reprinted in 1982, "Indian Life at the Old Missions" is filled with detailed photographs and fine line-drawings of the Native Americans who founded California, yet were destined to be forgotten, as settlers took over their land.

Lightfoot examines the interactions between Native American communities in California & the earliest colonial settlements, those of Russian pioneers & Franciscan missionaries. He compares the history of the different ventures & their legacies that still help define the political status of native people.