Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (review)

This book makes every effort to present a "detached analysis" that avoids the old "Christophilic Triumphalist" view associated with Franciscan histories and celebrants of the missions, or the "Christophobic Nihilist" view that condemns the missionaries' efforts and results and that the author claims to have dominated California mission historiography. This approach is problematical for several reasons. One is that such a "balanced view" is likely impossible given the current level of religious proselytism in certain circles. A second is that avoidance of judgment almost always eschews moral teaching and insight, and a third is that scholars of the missions, at least the top ones in such organizations as the California Mission Studies Association, have abandoned such binary oppositions as the "triumphalist" versus "nihilist."

Sandos concludes, "From a scholarly perspective . . . Indians and Franciscans together created a mission culture in a complex interplay in which the identification of heroes and villains is as difficult as it is irrelevant" (184). Many will be sympathetic to Sandos' nonjudgmental position, but others will want to know what, besides disease, caused the calamitous end of so many mission Indians. As an example of how such a putatively balanced view can miss significant points for analysis, the author maintains, "The Spanish and Franciscan ignorance that resulted in the unintentional diminishment of the California Indian population is not comparable to the deliberate Nazi practice in Europe" (180). Aside from the straw man in this comparison, Sandos' point elides an explicit part of the Spanish program, namely, the genocide of native peoples' indigenous cultures. The Franciscans' "conquista espiritual" may have intended conversion but not death, but to ignore the full implications of such conquest is to avoid what ultimately happened to the Indians.

The most original parts of the book lie in the author's authoritative discussions of music's role in the conversion of the Indians and in the use of sophisticated, contemporary writings on epidemiology to explain how venereal disease was able to race through the Indian populations so quickly and lethally. For Sandos, the meaning of Christianization encompasses more than a simple discussion of whether or not baptism and communion had much meaning for the Indians. His analysis of the "emotive state" that the competent Indian choristers likely achieved helps to humanize the experience of the missionized Indians. That venereal disease "constitutes one of the previously underappreciated factors contributing to the process of precipitous native population decline" ignores what many have written about the disease, but Sandos' analysis is the most thorough (111).

Sandos' research is impressive and his use of theology, epidemiology, and music history admirable. However, the book will provoke more disputes than it settles in this prominent and contentious field of study. That "priests taught Indians patriarchy and, in the process, lowered the status of women within Indian culture" assumes that Indian women had strong status before the Spaniards arrived and that the Indian cultures of California are susceptible to such generalization (166). Some scholars will challenge the static analysis of the missions and note that the dynamics in their first decades were different from those in the 1830s, when the missions were "secularized." Consensus on these matters will not be forthcoming, but such interdisciplinary approaches will lead to new ways of thinking about the California missions.