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My daughter, like all Californian 4th graders, had to do a semester-long study of the missions, including building a model of a mission, bells and all, which amounts to nothing more than ongoing propaganda for the genocide you aptly describe. I tried to give her the counter story in the most 4th-grader-friendly manner I could manage...

WOW, I can't believe that there are two of you.....sad

Do you believe all the crap on this thread? I assume it's Catholic solidarity. If they bothered to learn the truth about Serra and the "Missions"...Not. Even then they wouldn't get it. They push it in the schools now because if it's "hispanic" (a word that didn't exist then) it's gotta be revered as sacred...they can't admit that the Spaniards were the original slave owners and importers in the Americas, and that everything they did was about pushing the Spanish Empire. Anyone can do the research themselves - I did. It's appalling what was done to the "neophytes". From this website you get a summary:NATIVE AMERICANS in the MISSION

Nice paragraph:

All the work in the missions, according to both European observers and reports by the Native Americans themselves, was performed by the Indians. Getting them to adjust to working required strict regimentation and often harsh discipline. In contrast to their lives outside the mission, the missionized "neophyte" Native Americans lived in an atmosphere of repression and rigid intolerance, and the work they performed was forced labor.

It goes downhill from there.

And as for my claim of half the Natives dying, I was wrong. It was more like 2/3 of them:

" In other words, mission life was the equivalent of a slow death sentence for the California Native American population, which, by 1834, when the missions closed their doors, had been reduced to about one third of its original size in 1769."

Real Saint, that guy Serra.