Replies

The Kumeyaay people (Mission Indians) are still around today. They are very prosperous today and well educated. They have several reservations in San Diego County. They make a lot of money from the casinos and resorts on their reservations and they give a lot of money to charity. They appear to be far better off than the Indians I have seen in Montana. They have a school where they teach their young people the old language and customs. The Spanish missionaries probably treated the California Indians much, much better than their contemporaries in other parts of of North America.

Serra directly opposed both the slave-catchers and the military who wanted to prostitute the Indian women. The Indians who entered the mission system for protection did so freely, and they were treated the same as the monks: once in, they were not allowed to leave, they learned literacy and manual skills; they worked, and they shared equitably in the products of their labor. They could be subject to corporal punishment for theft, for fleeing their responsibilities, by refusing to work (like like monks, or even just as they would be in their own tribes.) Solders of the Spanish crown fared much worse!

There was no money, because neither the California Indians nor the Franciscans had a money economy: they had a customary exchange-based economy.

The Spanish military wanted the Indians to get into a money economy, because he wanted them to pimp their own sisters, wives and daughters to the soldiers for money and liquor. When Serra opposed this, they agitated to the governor to get the system taken away from the Franciscans.

Eventually the Indians ended up like serfs on the haciendas, and sexual consorts for the soldiers, but this was not Serra's doing. He strove, labored and suffered to obtain the well-being and redemption of the California Indians all his life.

In this tumultuous contact of two civilizations (Spanish and Indian) the Spanish ascendancy was inevitable; but the way they did it was unconscionable. Serra was an opponent of the colonial military power structure and did everything he knew how could to protect the Indians and to safeguard their human dignity.

If we were in the exact same situation, with the same range of options, we would have done nobly indeed to do the exact same thing.