Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory ed. by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider (review)

ALL TOO OFTEN, the literature available on the missions of the Spanish Borderlands has been written as though Indigenous peoples were simply an element of the mission landscape. However, Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory challenges this perspective, and instead considers the missions a part of an already-established Indigenous landscape. Taking a “cubist perspective” this anthology, edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider builds off the groundbreaking work of Columbian Consequences (1989), bringing us what Kent G. Lightfoot calls the “second major synthesis of archaeological research on the missions of the Spanish Borderlands” (193). The eleven essays in this volume provide a wealth of perspective on the Spanish missions as well as historical archaeology more broadly. Although the essays deal with several different field sites spanning the northern Spanish Borderlands and represent diverse analytical approaches, all engage with the idea that Native conventions persisted through the mission period. The essays demonstrate that interactions between missions and locals were mediated through Indigenous social structures and took place within Indigenous landscapes. Therefore, these landscapes should not be considered imperial spaces from the onset of contact. For example, in chapter 8 Glenn J. Farris demonstrates that even those among the Chumash people who resided at mission La Purisima relied on food grains from the local ecology the Chumash continued to maintain using their own Indigenous burning practices. This interaction places the Spanish mission and its inconsistent food supply as a secondary element added to primary Chumash relationships with their land.

Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions challenges archaeologists and ethnohistorians to not merely include Indigenous peoples but to place Indigenous peoples, spaces, and structures at the forefront when interpreting mission sites and narrating Spanish mission histories. The essays in this volume take critical steps toward reorienting mission histories by expanding mission contexts politically, socially, and spatially. To that end, the anthology is organized and driven by three overlapping themes. Part 1, “Power, Politics, and Belief,” focuses on intersections of Native and colonial structures. In chapter 2, “The Guale Uprising of 1597,” Elliot H. Blair and David Hurst Thomas emphasize that instead of interpreting Native groups’ actions as simple resistance against Spanish control, “these ‘rebellions’ actually reflect warfare and competition between Mississippian-style chiefdoms” (33). So the fundamental conflict was not based on a colonial–anticolonial continuum but within a set of relationships among Indigenous groups to which the Spanish missions were peripheral tools.

The essays in part 2, “External Connections,” examine missions from the perspective of Indigenous inhabitants, focusing on Indigenous neophyte connections and relationships to the surrounding landscape. For example, in chapter 6, “‘Countless Heathens’: Native Americans and the Spanish Missions of Southern Texas and Northeastern Coahuila,” Tamara L. Walter and Thomas R. Hester argue that the Aranama viewed mission Espiritu Santo as part of their Indigenous landscape. The mission was an additional resource where food and supplies could be obtained and a site that easily fit into seasonal migratory patterns. Walter and Hester demonstrate that as the mission became more successful and self-sustaining friars became less flexible with their expectations of Native labor and residency. Accordingly, the Aranama’s perception of the mission drastically changed from “a place of inclusion to one of avoidance and oppression within the Native landscape” (107).

Part 3, “Outside the Mission Walls,” broadens the narrative of missions by investigating spaces “beyond the mission walls” (8). Particularly noteworthy in the following section is chapter 9, “Points of Refuge in the South Central California Colonial Hinterlands” by Julienne Bernard, David Robinson, and Fraser Sturt. This chapter examines possible refugee sites in the Emigdiano Chumash region. Although the historical record indicates the use of fugitivism as a means of Indigenous resistance, “archeological evidence provides us with the only means of learning what life was like” for those who fled from missions (157...