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By Leon Thompson, host of East County Magazine’s Tribal Beat on KNSJ Radio
March 30, 2015 – (Vatican City) – Pope Francis, on a flight to Rome, declared to reporters, “In September, God willing, I will canonize Junipero Serra in the United States.”
In other words, the Pope intends to make Junipero Serra a Roman Catholic saint. However Junipero Serra is no Saint to indigenous people.
When Father Junipero Serra with a battalion of Spanish soldiers built a Mission near Kumeyaay Bay in 1769 there were around 300,000 indigenous people living in California. Serra was the founder of nine Roman Catholic Missions from San Diego’s Mission de Alcala to San Francisco. Serra’s accomplishment is hailed as the origin story for California filled with grand deeds and progress.
It is said that Serra performed a miracle by curing a nun in St. Louis of lupus. While beatification requires a miracle, the next step — canonization, or sainthood — requires a second miracle but Pope Francis, a fellow Jesuit, made an exception calling Serra a “Holy Man” and “great evangelizer.” Serra baptized nearly 6,000 Indians. It is for Serra’s success in evangelizing that Pope Francis points to as qualifying him as a Saint.
He viewed the indigenous tribes as heathens who desperately needed the Gospel, but the indigenous people of California paid a high price for their conversion. The Missions were built with Indian slave labor. Their ancient food supplies dwindled. Smallpox, measles, plague and other diseases spiked as they came together in these tight concentrations, and their numbers plummeted.
According to author and historian Robert Jackson, “Given a Native population collapse in the Spanish Catholic missions of “Alta California,” any Indian person consigned to or born in a mission had been pretty much given a death sentence. The massive destruction of the original nations and peoples of California is the reason why many in the Native American community believe there ought to be a mourning rather than a celebration associated with the ship San Salvador and the Spanish Catholic Mission system.
Steven Newcomb, co-founder of the Indigenous Law Institute wrote, “Pope Francis and the Vatican are going to celebrate the deadly and unsaintly Spanish Catholic mission system by bestowing sainthood on Junipero Serra. What does it say about a religion and a society when it pretends that a tradition of dehumanization and brutal domination is a tradition of virtue and saintliness? The same institution that brought us the Crusades, a Borgia Pope and the Inquisition is now going to sanctify Serra’s legacy.”
Father Manuel "Tony" Diaz, the administrator of the San Gabriel Mission founded in 1771, said his joyous reaction to the announcement of the padre's canonization was tempered by the knowledge that some of his own parishioners look upon Serra as a reminder of a lost or frayed tribal history.
At the time when Juan Cabrillo sailed in to Kumeyaay Bay the Kumeyaay Nation had a complex way of living off the land, migrating from the coast to the foothills every year to follow the food supply, cultivating and harvesting staples and weaving elaborate baskets to store and carry their goods. They manipulated the chaparral with fire to produce more food to pick and animals to hunt.
Cattle ranching and sheep grazing by the Europeans led to the collapse of the traditional Kumeyaay economy, aided by a later law banning the Indians from burning the landscape. Those who converted were forced to drop their old ways and eat, dress and act like the Europeans.
Public Broadcasting produced an alarming documentary on Serra and the Mission system. It reports, “Despite the frequent conflicts between military and religious authority, for Alta California's Indians the missions and their Franciscan administrators were part and parcel of an enormously destructive colonization process. The Spanish, largely through disease, were responsible for a population decline from about 300,000 Indians in 1769 to about 200,000 by 1821. The strenuous work regime and high population density within the missions themselves also caused high death rates among the mission Indians. By law, all baptized Indians subjected themselves completely to the authority of the Franciscans; they could be whipped, shackled or imprisoned for disobedience, and hunted down if they fled the mission grounds. Indian recruits, who were often forced to convert nearly at gunpoint, could be expected to survive mission life for only about ten years. As one Friar noted, the Indians "live well free but as soon as we reduce them to a Christian and community life... they fatten, sicken, and die."
In Junipero Serra’s defense, Gregory Orfalea, who wrote a biography of Serra said, “When the Kumeyaay sacked the San Diego Mission in 1775 — killing three Spaniards — the viceroy captured about a dozen Indians and called for their execution. But Serra called for the prisoners' release and pleaded their case to the viceroy in a letter – in which he wrote: "As to the killer, let him live so that he can be saved, for that is the purpose of our coming here and its sole justification."
In so doing, Orfalea says, Serra modeled his life on the gospel of love — not a desire for land or gold. And in this way, he was different from Columbus, who enslaved and tortured Caribbean natives in his quest for precious metals.”
Orfalea said Pope Francis' decision was no surprise. A Jesuit who took the name after the saint and founder of the Franciscan order, Francis does not believe in Catholicism confined to the ivory tower. Serra was a kindred spirit who abandoned a high-profile academic post to take on the dangerous, austere life of a missionary.
Ruben Mendoza, coordinator of California mission archaeology at Cal State Monterey Bay, says the canonization is long overdue: "I've always felt the canonization process was stymied through misinformation and politicization, and laying blame and onus on one individual who was actually in constant conflict with governors and military commanders in New Spain over how they were treating Indians."
He and others said Serra fought efforts to enslave the Indians. And whippings were not limited to natives, but a common method of discipline in the Spanish empire.
"On occasion," Mendoza said, "I've met with American Indian groups who tell their students — 50 to 60 at a time — how the California missionaries raped, plundered and murdered Native American civilization. But I go through Serra's own documents and I don't see any of that."
Steve Newcomb concludes, “The fact remains that the Juan Cabrillo ship San Salvador, was built with the spent lives of Indians and crushing Indian slave labor; the twenty one Spanish Catholic missions were also built with Indian slave labor and resulted in a genocidal level population collapse among the Native nations of the geographical area called “California.””
Ron Andrade, executive director of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission, compared Serra to the Spanish conquistadors who subjugated South America. Andrade, a Luiseño Indian from the La Jolla Band of Kumeyaay said Serra “decimated the Indian population.” “Everywhere they put a mission the majority of Indians are gone,” Andrade said, “and Serra knew what they were doing, they were taking the land, taking the crops, he knew the soldiers were raping women, and he turned his head.”
Many tribes, including the Luiseños, Juaneño and Gabrielino-Tongva, survived the mission era through partial integration with each other and Spanish culture, but others fled inland or lost their culture completely, Andrade said.
The choice of Serra for canonization is especially unfortunate, given that the Catholic Church has been making its first attempts at reconciliation with some of California’s indigenous people, who experienced devastating losses due to the colonial system ushered in by Serra.
On Dec. 22, 2012, Bishop Richard Garcia of the Monterey Diocese offered the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band apologies from the church. He invited people to a Mass of Reconciliation between the church and tribal members at Mission San Juan Bautista. In other former missions, tribal communities have sought recognition for the trauma their ancestors experienced — wounds that often remain open today. The selection of Serra seems antithetical to the current emphasis on and need for reconciliation.
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/01/17/father-serras-sainthood-sanctifying-legacy-domination
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-serra-20150117-story.html#page=1
http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/serra.htm
http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/pope-to-canonize-evangelizer-of-the-west-during-u.s.-trip/
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