A readable and succinct account of how Indians fared under their Spanish Franciscan colonizers.

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.

The subject of missions-formal efforts at religious conversion of native peoples of the Americas by colonizing powers-is one that renders the modern student a bit uncomfortable. Where the mission enterprise was actuated by true belief it strikes the modern sensibility as fanaticism; where it sprang from territorial or economic motives it seems the rankest sort of hypocrisy. That both elements-greed and real faith-were usually present at the same time is bewildering. In this book seven scholars attempt to create a "new" mission history that deals honestly with the actions and philosophic motivations of the missionaries, both as individuals and organizations and as agents of secular powers, and with the experiences and reactions of the indigenous peoples, including their strategies of accommodation, co-optation, and resistance. The new mission historians examine cases from throughout the hemisphere-from the Andes to northern Mexico to California-in an effort to find patterns in the contact between the European missionaries and the various societies they encountered. Erick Langer is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880-1930 and editor, with Zulema Bass Werner de Ruiz, of Historia de Tarija: Corpus Documental. Robert H. Jackson is the author of Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840 and Regional Markets and the Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia Cochabamba, 1539-1960. He is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Geography at Texas Southern University.

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.

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.

My main argument in the dissertation is that ambiguity characterized the conquest of California. Challenging the dominant narrative that Franciscan missionaries possessed the wherewithal to convince thousands of coastal California Indians to forsake their native ways in order to become loyal Catholic subjects of the Spanish crown, my dissertation argues that Native Californians made creative use of Spanish colonization to suit their native purposes. In doing so, we find that unlike Franciscan missionaries, California Indians assumed and embraced ambiguity as a defining characteristic of their relationship to Catholicism and Spanish culture. This dissertation questions dichotomies that historians have taken for granted as almost natural: Christian Indians vs. non-Christian Indians, Hispanicized Indians vs. non-Hispanicized Indians, mission Indians vs. non-mission Indians, and neophytes vs. gentiles. Based on the documentation left behind by Franciscan missionaries and subsequent historians, one gets the impression that if you walked from a mission compound into a native community, the differences would be stark and easily observed: language, food, clothing, the built environment, spiritual rituals, daily subsistence practices, and even the most intimate sexual relationships would have been different. If we are to believe the Franciscan missionaries, the reason for such differences derived from the success of the Franciscans at converting Indians to the Catholic faith and introducing them to "civilization." My dissertation emphasizes the similarities between baptized Indians and non-baptized Indians. By examining native leadership patterns, cloth consumption, work practices, and the relationship between mission communities and Native Californians from interior regions, the dissertation de-emphasizes the role of Franciscan missionaries in shaping Indian-Spanish relations, and emphasizes the influence of California Indians, neophytes and non-Christian alike, in shaping the early history of Alta California.