Customer Reviews

Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The following review appeared in the February 2005 issue of CHOICE.

42-3615 E78 2003-70398 MARC

Sandos, James A. Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the missions. Yale, 2004. 251p bibl index afp ISBN 0300101007, $35.00

Historian Sandos (Univ. of Redlands) provides a richly contextualized history of the California missions from their inception under Junipero Serra in 1769 to the time of their secularization in 1836. The author deftly steers between sanctification and vilification of the California mission system by examining not only the material and political goals of the Franciscans, but also their theological and cosmological understandings of the world around them. Sandos applies this same interpretive agenda to the vast array of Native peoples in California. Chapters focus on often-ignored topics such as the role of music in the mission system, the devastating impact of syphilis on Native demographics, and the importance of Native resistance, accommodation, and acceptance of this outside force. The author concludes with the impact of the mission and a discussion of the moral legitimacy of the mission process. While some will not be happy that Sandos eschews partisan judgments against or exonerations of Franciscans and the Spanish system of colonization, his work clearly sheds considerable light on this highly controversial encounter while encouraging even further study, thus serving as a model for future research. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels and libraries. -- R. A. Bucko,S.J., Creighton University

I highly recomend this book as an introduction to the California Mission period. I bought this book because I have three children in the California schools. Two of them have been through the fourth grade, the grade where they intensively studied the missions. Having not grown up here, I was vaguely dissatisfied with the sanitized story they were getting. But I had no ideas about it myself except a default assumption that the story was really one of slavery and genocide.

It was not slavery. I like how the author characterized it as something more like spiritual debt peonage. It was not genocide, though its impact on the Indians was horific. (Genocide would wait for the goldrush and aftermath.) The priests were not evil men. On a strictly moral level, they were good men, most of them. But they were of a medieval mindset, reactionaries in an enlightment world. They mostly did what they did out of love for "their" Indians and out of ignorance.

Of course they had no doubt that they brought spritual truth, life evelasting etc. to the Indians. So they had no compunction about suppressing the native culture. But they suffered greatly seeing that converted Indians in the missions tended to sicken and die, while their free living unconverted brethren were plump, vigorous, fertile and happy. They knew nothing of germs and not much about nutrition. So they could not understand the devastation the mission system was causing.

His chapter on the Native peoples was an excellent introduction. I had no idea of the huge number of native people that lived in California before contact and their vibrant culture and lifestyle.

If the book has flaws, it becomes a bit repetitive in the chapter on Indian resistance. The author has really made those points already and well throughout the book. Also two chapters are excellent in themselves, but to my mind not as well integrated into the fabric of the book as they could be. The picture painted in the chapter on venereal disease is tragic. After that, it is hard to know how the amazing accomplishment of Indian musicians described in the chapter on music were possible. Of course I understand that events occured over more than sixty years, up and down the coast of California, so there was doubtless regional and temporal variation. This is not a big deal. But I'd appreciate it, if he'd clarified a bit.