Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory

1. Native Agency at the Margins of Empire: Indigenous Landscapes, Spanish Missions, and Contested Histories

5 1 Native Agency at the Margins of Empire Indigenous Landscapes, Spanish Missions, and Contested Histories Tsim D. Schneider and Lee M. Panich Between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Catholic missionaries from Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican orders established and operated missions in what has come to be known as the Spanish Borderlands—extending from the Florida and Georgia coasts west to the Californias.1 Throughout this vast region, Native people built mission buildings , raised mission crops, and tended mission herds, but in many cases they also maintained strong ties to their ancestral homelands and to indigenous communities living outside of colonial control. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research on Spanish colonialism in North America looks beyond the well-known tripartite system of missions, pueblos, and presidios to a range of sacred and secular spaces, broadening scholarly understanding of the indigenous experience of missionization to include the myriad ways Native people creatively negotiated the constraints and opportunities of the colonial period. We seek to continue this trend by bringing together a diverse group of scholars to consider the potential for studying Spanish missions within indigenous landscapes, broadly conceived. Rather than simply seeing missions as irreversible entry points of Indigenous people into colonial society, the contributors to this volume look to understand the varied ways that Native people incorporated the Spanish mission system into dynamic indigenous landscapes. 1. For further information on imperial Spain and missionization, see Elliot (2002) and Kamen (2003). Wade (2008) provides a concise overview of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionary operations in the Spanish Borderlands of North America. 6 Introduction In this sense, we hope to move toward the “cubist perspective” on Spanish colonialism outlined by Thomas (1989a, 1991b) in the seminal multivolume work Columbian Consequences. This analogy posits that research on the missions , as well as other aspects of the Spanish colonial program, can be addressed from a variety of approaches and viewpoints, rather than from a single research paradigm. To be sure, many scholars have identified or alluded to connections that mission communities had to the broader landscape, but in general archaeological and historical investigations into the mission period usually focus on mission sites themselves. Yet the mission experience extended far outside the mission walls, to the nearby neophyte rancherias, to mission stations and outlying ranchos, to unmissionized indigenous villages, and often far into the colonial hinterlands where Native individuals and families sought refuge, procured local resources, and traded colonial goods to distant groups linked through wide-ranging and enduring exchange networks. A focus on the Native landscape thus provides a window into Indigenous people’s active negotiation of colonialism and also offers a more holistic view on the mission enterprise and its consequences. The wide diversity of data sets and research questions explored by the contributors to this collection also underscores the potential of multiple, cross-cutting perspectives for generating new Figure 1.1. Geographic locations of study areas addressed in each chapter. Map by Starla Lane. Native Agency at the Margins of Empire 7 and important insights into the complex and often contested histories of the Spanish Borderlands. The overarching goal of this volume is to highlight the agency of Native people living in the Spanish Borderlands of North America, where missions were the primary institution of colonization (figure 1.1). By agency, we mean the interested action of individuals and groups, derived from existing cultural values and mediated by the ever-shifting constraints and opportunities of the material and social world. In highlighting the agency of Native people on the margins of the Spanish empire, we hope to further underscore our belief that missions were more than colonial outposts—they were also indigenous places. As such, missions should be understood within the context of indigenous cultures and histories, not simply as sites of colonial settlement and venues of cultural domination. In thinking about these issues, the contributors of this volume touch on three main themes or linkages between mission sites and the broader Native landscape: (1) power, politics, and belief; (2) external connections such as trade networks and subsistence practices; and (3) the continued occupation of colonial hinterlands, including refuge communities. While these connections are by no means mutually exclusive, we have organized the volume thematically to highlight the various ways in which archaeologists are considering Native people’s active negotiations of the Spanish mission system in North America. The first section of the volume focuses on the intersections of...