Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (review)

Alta California was a colony of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, founded in 1769 to keep Russian and British traders from claiming that part of the Pacific coast. Although missions were on the decline in Latin America, opposed by regalists and reformers alike, mercantilist theory required that this late-coming colony pay for itself. José de Gálvez revived the mission reduction as an economical way to occupy territory and support presidios. Without conquerors to demand encomiendas of tributary Indians, chronic wars to supply a stream of captives, or a repartimiento system to draft and allocate minimum-wage laborers, California's economy rested on the missions, which sold the neophytes' products at low prices and retained half of their wages when they were hired out.

The Franciscans had a low opinion of their "rude" converts, who chanted the "Rezo" in all too many languages and in foraging season looked longingly at the hills and seashores. As time passed, and the Indians of California met and exceeded European norms—becoming productive farmers, pastoralists, and craftsmen; establishing town governments on the Spanish model; learning to play musical instruments; and converting the missions into general stores—the missionaries continued to marginalize them as unfit for communion. Father Junípero Serra (about whom Hackel has little to say) in fourteen years of ministry at Mission San Carlos de Borromeo, near the presidio of Monterey, never once administered the Viaticum to a native (173).

In a significant reinterpretation of North American colonial history, Hackel concludes that the conquest of Alta California was ecological. California's 300,000 native inhabitants were not subdued by the seasoned gobernantes, by the 1,000 settlers and soldiers from upper New Spain, nor by the spiritual power of the Spanish-born Franciscans. From seacoast to hinterland, they were conquered by European pathogens, animals, and plants. Epidemics devastated the villages and drove the survivors to take refuge in the reductions, where endemic diseases like syphilis lay waiting to reduce them further. Escaped livestock caused an "ungulate irruption," degrading the environment and allowing European weeds and grasses to replace the native species. Under this double onslaught, hunting-gathering-fishing peoples could no longer sustain their families nor pass along their ancient skills. The "dual revolutions" answer, at last, the vexing questions of why wave after wave of Indians continued to enter the confines of the reductions, and why, despite mistreatment, they stayed in them instead of returning to the freedom of their valleys and villages.

The first to apply the technique of family reconstitution, developed for the study of early modern communities in England and France, to an Indian community in colonial Latin America, Hackel has mined the exhaustive nominal records of Mission San Carlos, covering about 3,000 Indians who lived there between 1770 and 1850 (see the methodological comments in Appendix A). His findings, presented in dozens of tables, are poignant. Less than a quarter of mission-born infants lived to be fifteen, the average age at first marriage for mission-born females. The average length of a union was only eight years; a majority of couples were infertile; and fewer than one in ten mission-married women reached the age of fifty (106–113, 215–216). Recognizing that a single mission could be anomalous, Hackel has applied the same technique to the populations of Missions San Diego and San Gabriel, using data compiled under his direction by the staff at the Early California Population Project at the Huntington Library, with similar preliminary results. He has also checked his conclusions against existing research for all twenty-one California missions. Everywhere, Indian population was in free fall.

In his last chapter, Hackel shows that a remnant of Christian Indians survived the secularization of the missions—which in California, unlike Florida or Mexico, became doctrinas only after they were secularized—to take up lands...