Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians by Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 287 After Spanish recolonization in the l690's, Knaut concludes,"miscegenation continued to erase the genetic lines separating the land's native inhabitants from the newest set of colonists" (p. 186). What seems more remarkable to me is how the Pueblos, including mixed-blood babies raised by them, and Híspanles kept and still keep their reassuringly separate cultural identities. Having raised these important questions, I hope Andrew Knaut will return to consider them further with the same verve he has demonstrated in this spirited first book. John L. Kessell University ofNew Mexico Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians. By Robert H.Jackson and Edward Castillo. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1995. Pp. vii, 213. $32.50.) The impact of the Franciscan missions on the Indians of California long has been a subject of intense debate. Even during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the missions were in their ascendancy, visitors expressed widely different views. The debate continues today as the founder of the California missions, Father Junípero Serra, O.F.M., moves toward canonization as the first saint of the Golden State. Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization is a major contribution to this ongoing controversy. Historian Robert H. Jackson and anthropologist Edward Castillo (Cahuilla/Luiseño) summarize and advance the critical view of the missions, challenging various contentions held by mission defenders. The authors criticize especially the "parochialism that has characterized a century of writing on the missions, both professional and popular" (p. 6). Their intention is to place the history of the California missions within the larger context of Spanish colonization of the Americas. Thus, in their analysis, the fundamental purpose of the missions was "to acculturate the Alta California Indians and prepare them for their role in a new colonial order" (p. 6). Jackson and Castillo challenge specifically the contention that the Indians of California were attracted to the missions by the promise of a steady food supply . Through extensive statistical analysis, the authors find little correlation between levels of grain production in the missions and the numbers of new recruits. "Food supply," they conclude, "was therefore not a major determinant in the ability of the Franciscans to relocate Indians to the missions" (p. 47). This conclusion supports the earlier view of physiologist S. F. Cook that the Franciscans resorted to forced recruitment, a view refuted by the historian-archivist Father Francis Guest, O.F.M. The authors also challenge the findings of the geographer David Hornbeck that the missionaries, in later years, shifted away from the acculturation of the 288 BOOK REVIEWS Indians to large-scale commercial agriculture. Jackson and Castillo argue that both acculturation and the production of agricultural surpluses were present throughout the mission period. Indeed this was part of the original plan for the extension of Spanish control to Alta California: The missionaries were obligated to provide surplus agricultural products to the supporting military garrisons to help defray the costs of colonization. The chapter on"Resistance and Social Control in theAlta California Missions" is a hard-hitting blow to mission apologists. In wrenching detail, the authors trace the evolution of resistance by the California Indians to missionization. Early resistance was led by traditional village chiefs and shamans; later resistance leaders came from the ranks of mission neophytes. Active resistance included the poisoning and murdering of priests; passive resistance included flight, work slow-downs, and maintaining a "wall of silence" to protect traditional beliefs. Floggings, stocks, shackles, and other forms of public humiliation were used by the Spanish missionaries to break the resistance and prepare the Indians for their place in the new colonial order. The account of the California missions offered here stands in stark contrast to what is found in the works ofsuch historians as Harry Kelsey and Doyce Nunis, historians damned by Castillo and Jackson as representing "an older, eurocentric and triumphal view of the experience of California Indians in the missions" (p. 85). It remains for the reader to find the truth. James J. Rawls Diablo Valley College Pleasant Hill, California The Myth ofAmerican Individualism: The Protestant Origins ofAmerican Political Thought. By Barry Alan Shain. (Princeton...