Tragic Side of Mission Era Being Told

The history lesson was well known to generations of California schoolchildren: Father Junipero Serra and his Franciscan disciples converted Indians from heathen savages into God-fearing Christians, filling their bellies with meat, their souls with enlightenment.

“The Indians had the feeling of being part of something much bigger than the old Indian village,” wrote the authors of a standard 1965 textbook. “On the whole, they must have felt better off than before.”

The lesson of the 1990s is starkly different: Although Serra and his Spanish brethren came with lofty intentions, their arrival in 1769 signaled the demise of the very people they sought to save.

“For the people who had lived in California for hundreds of years before the Spanish arrived, the growth of the missions was tragic,” says the state-adopted textbook currently read by fourth-graders, for whom state history is mandatory. “Thousands of Indians died, and by the end of the 1800s much of the Indian way of life had died also.”

Both Sides of the Picture

For decades, California schoolchildren studied the 65-year mission era by building sugar-cube models of Serra’s adobe edifices, an apt symbol of what some scholars now call a sugar-coated and distinctly white version of state history.

Today, because of Native American activism and academic multiculturalism, California students are not only building mock missions but keeping journals and playing roles in an effort to reexamine the period through the perspectives of priests, soldiers and Indians alike.

And the state Department of Education, whose history textbooks once depicted Indians living idyllic lives in Spanish California, now publishes a handbook for teachers that calls the converts “virtual prisoners” of the missions.

“History educators and parents are willing to look history more squarely in the face, warts and all, and see it through different sets of eyes,” said UCLA history professor Gary B. Nash, co-author of the state’s current fourth-grade history text, “Oh, California.” “It is part of a willingness as Americans to be more frank about our past.”

But the sensitivity that produced change in textbooks and classrooms continues to fuel controversy about what exactly constitutes historical truth--part of a broader debate in which critics contend that multiculturalism overemphasizes themes of oppression. Rather than promoting a sense of shared civic pride in young students, they say, the new accounts only foster ethnic and racial division.

“The moment we want history to become the servant of a political cause we do a disservice to everyone--schoolchildren, citizens and those who are concerned with the truth,” said Alfred Balitzer, a professor of government and American history at Claremont McKenna College. “We need to restore some kind of balance.”

The debate is expected to move from academic circles to the political battlefield next year when state education officials initiate the process of adopting new history textbooks.

The last time the state adopted textbooks, in 1990, the process drew complaints from a wide spectrum of interest groups--from African Americans and Asians to Jews and Christians--each concerned about perceived misrepresentations.

Conservative groups already are discussing strategies for retelling state history.

“I’m absolutely sure we will write articles and talk to legislators, to the governor’s office and other folks to let them know our viewpoint,” said Lance Izumi, co-director of the Center for Innovation in Education in San Francisco. “I’m not opposed in theory to allowing viewpoints of the Indians in the whole missionary system. What I do think is worrisome is if people use that as a pretext for an anti-European ideological agenda.”

Native Americans Speak Out

The drive to tell a new story began three decades ago in the politically charged atmosphere of the civil rights movement, when Native Americans joined other minority groups in staking a claim to their historic contributions to this country.

Native American educators, among them World War II veterans who earned college degrees under the GI Bill, began to recognize disturbing patterns among their young: students were dropping out of school in alarming numbers while others struggled under white teachers who showed little appreciation for Native American culture.

So, like many others in the 1960s, the activists organized.

One group they formed in 1964, the American Indian Historical Society, focused on history books. The association reviewed dozens of proposed texts, found them to be defamatory and urged state officials against adopting them, only to see some of the books approved for use. The association ultimately launched a publishing enterprise and began to produce its own series of history books.

Another group founded three years later, the California Indian Education Assn., pressed federal lawmakers to restore education funding for Native Americans and campaigned for the state Department of Education to open a unit devoted to Native Americans.

Both organizations staged conferences to educate Native American teachers and to draw supporters. Their founders began to establish Native American studies programs at universities, conducting research to document the brutality of mission life.

“Change has come about because of the people themselves, not because the state wanted it,” said David Risling, a member of the Hoopa people in Northern California and a retired professor who co-founded the California Indian Education Assn. and the Native American studies program at UC Davis. “We had to fight tooth and nail.”

Meanwhile, a new generation of white professors began to rise through the ranks of academia, challenging once-sacred tenets that filtered California’s past through the eyes of white explorers.

Heralding the new multicultural anthem of the day, these young scholars sought to write about people long missing from the historical record.

“We were looking at books assigned to us in graduate classes and saying, ‘This seems pretty one-dimensional. Where are the Indian voices? Where are the black Americans?’ ” said Nash, who earned his doctorate from Princeton University in 1964. “There was a lot of ferment, a lot of carving out new terrain that didn’t always please our professors.”

Between the rebel scholars and Native American activists, tangible results began appearing.

In 1972, the California Legislature created an office of Indian education within the state Department of Education--the same office that today distributes a teachers’ handbook saying that the Spanish missions suppressed native culture, punished runaways and converted Indians to protect against the “sin of idleness.”

In addition, Native Americans have held seats on the official panels that review textbooks for the state, and they routinely serve as consultants to publishers of California history books.

Acknowledging the Negative

The most telling sign of change has appeared in the texts themselves.

One 1984 book--”California: People of a Region”--says the Indians were forced to live at the missions, where they were “beaten or chained up” for running away. Many Indians perished from diseases brought by the Spanish explorers, according to the book, which provides a chart showing that California’s Indian population dropped from 300,000 in 1769 to 100,000 in 1834, the close of the mission period.

The state’s current history book--”Oh, California”--reiterates those lessons in a section titled “Problems at the Missions,” in which it also provides a first-hand account from a Gabrielino woman who helped lead a revolt against the San Gabriel Mission in 1875.

“I hate the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers,” the book quotes the woman, 24-year-old Toypurina, as telling Spanish officials upon her arrest.

Still, the textbooks tread lightly on the role of Father Serra, the founder of the California missions who has been championed for sainthood by the Catholic Church but reviled by Native Americans as a brutal overlord.

“Oh, California” says Serra believed he was offering the Indians “something wonderful--religious faith,” and that he taught his converts how to farm so they could support themselves. Some Native American scholars criticize the textbook for failing to present a more critical view of Serra and the harsh conditions under which the Indians were forced to live.

“Serra believed in the punishment of the flesh and the punishment of Indians,” said Jack Forbes, another co-founder of UC Davis’ Native American studies program, who has published numerous books about California’s Native Americans.

“To say he would teach the Indians trade and farming crafts was simply not true,” Forbes said. “They were made to go to work and learn skills to support the Spaniards, not to support themselves. It makes it sound like it was a benign thing to help the Indians.”

Nash said he would like the book’s revised edition, which will be reviewed by the state next year, to address the debate over Serra.

“I think fourth-graders are intelligent enough to read about how Serra himself has become controversial,” Nash said. “I think you can give them a sense of what he thought he was doing and how the Indians experienced his role.”

Nash and other historians are quick to point out that, even with more accurate books, efforts to promote a revised mission story ultimately get diffused by teachers who bring their own grade school sensibilities to the subject.

What Children Are Taught

Although teachers are required to take cultural awareness training to earn their state credentials, mission-era history is not a routine part of their education. And the mission period is taught by fourth-grade generalists, not history specialists.

Native Americans also note that teaching their history is not a priority in school districts because American Indians constitute only a tiny fraction--less than 1%--of California’s 5.6 million students.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, where Native Americans make up less than 1% of the 667,000 students, is the only district in the state with an American Indian Education Commission--a panel created 20 years ago in response to concerns raised by Native American parents.

Among other activities, the commission sponsors annual seminars so teachers across California can learn how to educate Native American students. One of the speakers at last year’s conference focused on the mission era.

Still, teachers in Los Angeles and elsewhere are increasingly going beyond the current textbook to inform their students about life on the missions.

At 75th Street Elementary in South-Central Los Angeles, for example, Arleen Chatman, who served as an advisor to the panel that revised the state’s history standards a decade ago, teaches about Spanish California by asking students to keep journals and play act.

In one recent lesson, students posing as Indians wrote about their objections to being brought to the missions and having to give up their old customs. By contrast, students donning the guise of missionaries wrote about how they helped teach the Indians to grow grapes and make saddles.

Los Angeles school officials applaud such classroom work, saying it reinforces the widely accepted practice of teaching history from many perspectives. Here, as elsewhere, the approach has drawn few if any objections from parents and seems to be a matter of debate mainly among academics and politicians.

At the San Fernando Mission, which hosts thousands of Los Angeles students each year, tour guides teach what they regard as the historical truth by emphasizing how friars sought to improve the lives of the Indians.

Although the guides acknowledge that the newcomers brought deadly diseases, they say the missionaries vehemently protested the military’s brutal treatment of the Indians, and introduced them to farming and European technology.

“These were frontier outposts for a country that was trying to expand its borders,” said mission curator Kevin Feeney. “These folks were sent out to acquire land for a king who needed a source to feed and clothe his country. They didn’t go out to conquer land to make everybody slaves.

“We point out that you have to take everything in the historical context of 200 years ago.”

Wednesday: A look at what happened to the area’s mission Indians and how their descendants are trying to keep their culture alive.

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Changing History Lessons / VIEWING THE MISSION ERA THROUGH DIFFERENT EYES 1965

“California: A History” (California State Department of Education, 1065)

“Indians helped the settlers, and the settlers helped the Indians. The Indians had better food and clothing than they had ever had. They were more comfortable than they had ever been.”

“Once in a while a mission Indian had to be punished for something he had done. Sometimes such Indians ran away. Some of them took guns with them. Sometimes they took horses with them, too. The runaway Indians taught the wild Indians how to steal animals and other things from the missions. Once in a while soldiers had to protect the missions from an Indian raid.”

*

“California’s Own History” (California State Department of Education, 1965)

“The Indians at the missions ate more regularly than they had when they were wild. The padres took care of them in many ways...They learned to do many things as the Spaniards did. They learned many new skills.”

1991

“Oh, California” (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1991)

“Although some Indians were content on the missions, many others were unhappy with this new way of life. By living at the missions the Indians gave up their own culture, the way of life they had known in their tribal villages. They could only leave the mission grounds with permission from the padres. They were not free to hunt or to pick berries.”

“Mission Indians were not allowed to return to their tribes once they agreed to take part in mission life. Some ran away. But soldiers usually brought them back, and sometimes whipped them. Others wanted to revolt. They wanted to rise up against their leaders, the Spanish padres and soldiers at the mission communities.

“Sometimes Indians revolted violently. Six years after its founding, San Diego Mission was attacked by Indians. They set the mission on fire and killed one of the padres.”

“Many Indians died of diseases brought by the Spanish. When crops failed, Indians didn’t have enough to eat. Some became sick from the change in their diet on the missions. By the end of the mission period, the California Indian population was half the size that it had been when Father Serra raised his first cross at San Diego Mission.