Father Serra

I was enjoying the articles on the missions in California until Sept. 2, when I read the accounts of Father Junipero Serra, who has been my hero for many a year. The enthusiasm, zeal and dedication to his faith and the spread of it brought him to the New World with a purpose and vision that was marvelous to behold.

Reading my grandson’s school text has brought home to me the tremendous change in what is taught in school today. You wonder how history will treat the current problem of poverty and the prodding of the government to employ the unemployed. History majors seem to give short shrift to any semblance of gratitude.

TOM JOYCE

Pasadena

* The American Indian Movement resents and objects to Padre Serra being considered for “possible” sainthood by the Catholic Church. Serra used the various Indian people of California, in slave-type conditions, to build the missions. Those who resisted were tortured, and even killed.

In the Santa Barbara Mission cemetery are 3,000 Chumash people “dumped” in a mound-like area. No individual recognition for the statues, the stones that were all built by them. Some missions do have signs, giving acknowledgment, but no individual recognition. To proclaim this man a “saint” would be saying “it was OK” to enslave and kill the Indian cultures of California!

ED LONE WOLF

Santa Monica

* When the missions were secularized, the neophytes were not “turned out” bereft of resources, as “Descendants of Mission Indians Revisit Heritage” (Sept. 3) implies. While many mission Indians did not retain title to their lands, the plan for the secularization of the Franciscan missions, issued Aug. 9, 1834, assigned one-half the mission lands and property to neophytes in grants of 33 acres of arable land along with land “in common” sufficient “to pasture their stock.” In addition, one-half of the mission herds were divided proportionately among the neophyte families.

GLORIA RICCI LOTHROP

W.P. Whitsett Chair

of California History