"Saying the Padre Had Grabbed Her": Rape is the Weapon, Story is the Cure

Vicenta Gutierrez, sister of 'The Blonde' Gutierrez, when [she was] a girl went to confession one evening during Lent, and Father Real wanted her, to grab her over there in the church. And next day there was no trace of the padre there, and he was never seen again. He probably fled on horseback in the night. Some said he fled to Spain. He was a Spaniard. He grabbed the girl and screwed her. The girl went running to her house, saying the padre had grabbed her.

"Art and literature and storytelling are at the epicenter of all that an individual or a nation intends to be. And someone more profound than most said that a nation which does not tell its own stories cannot be said to be a nation at all." Elizabeth Cook Lynn, "Life and Death in the Mainstream of American Indian Biography"

(93).

"Who is actually the author of field notes? . . . Indigenous control over knowledge gained in the field can be considerable and even determining . . . Ethnographers aspire to a Flaubertian omniscience that moves freely throughout the world of indigenous subjects. Beneath the surface, though, their texts are more unruly and discordant." James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture

(45, 48)

Survivors might "use confession and memory as tools of intervention . . . storytelling becomes a process of historization. It does not remove women from history but enables us to see ourselves as part of history." bell hooks, Talking Back

(110).

The story of Vicenta Gutierrez begins long before April 1935, when Native consultant Isabel Meadows told J.P. Harrington about a young Indian woman raped at Carmel Mission by the local priest one hundred years before. In 1935, salvage ethnology was the name of the game: ethnologists and anthropologists were obsessed with preserving "traditional" knowledge like language, vocabulary, religious beliefs, creation stories, hunting and gathering techniques and resources. This field note, however, records a story illustrative of the corruption of authority and power by Europeans, and the vocal resistance of an Indian woman—not a topic at the top of anyone's salvage list. Yet Isabel Meadows, from the Monterey/Carmel Indian community, made sure that this story (among many others) found its way into the archives. Meadows knew she was a valuable resource to Harrington; he returned to her again and again, pleaded with her to work with no one else, snapped up the bits and pieces of cultural information and language she fed him, always enough to keep him hooked. But in between the language lessons and Coyote stories Harrington was after, Isabel snuck in the stories she wanted to salvage: her own private project, a memorial, and a charmstone of hope for future generations.

From J.P. Harrington's field notes. Date: April 1935. Reel 73, page 98, side B. Consultant: Isabel Meadows. Translation/transcription:

Thus, Isabel's story about Vicenta becomes a historical microcosm of rape as a primary tool of colonization, but more impressively, an example of storytelling as indigenous survival strategy; Isabel's story becomes a petroglyph or hyperlink or, as poet and scholar Paula Gunn Allen once said, a "hyperglyph" which, when we touch on it, reveals layer upon layer of detail embedded in her narrative.¹ As a descendent of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Area, and as a survivor of rape, I am drawn to Vicenta's story as one that speaks to me on many levels. So in order to understand and appreciate more fully the value of this story, and to do honor to Isabel and Vicenta, we must start at the real beginning—or ending—depending on one's perspective. The end of the world is not science fiction to California Indians.

"Brought up in a school of harlots": Captive Students

During Columbus' 1493 expedition, the explorer routinely gave native women to his subordinates as rewards and incentive. One such woman was captured and given to colonist and "nobleman" Michele de Cuneo as a gift slave from Columbus. Cuneo wrote in a...