What crap. The Mission system existed to make the natives into subjects of the Spanish King, which they became upon baptism.
Serra was sent there to try to establish a Spanish claim on California which had languished for 300 years since the Treaty of Tordesillas. Once there was word of British and Russian initiatives on the West Coast the Spanish oligarchs in Mexico City got scared and tried to make a feeble claim to the entire West, which El Papa In His Majesty had granted them in 1495.
But Serra and his thugs only inflicted death and destruction on the California Indians. They died by the tens of thousands of smallpox, just as the Aztecs and Toltecs of Central Mexico had died when Cortez arrived.
From 300,000 Indians in 1769 to 150,000 in 1846 at the beginning of the Mexican War, his legacy is death and destruction for the real indigenous of California, not the posturing frauds of Mexico.
“By one reckoning, Serra’s legacy is nothing less than California itself”
He had a huge impact on founding and creating California.
Your leftist polemic, on the other hand, is more along the lines of the fecal matter you attribute to the above quote.
Swallowing boatloads of drivel fed by the leftist Marxist professoriate?
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...
“But Serra and his thugs only inflicted death and destruction on the California Indians. They died by the tens of thousands of smallpox, just as the Aztecs and Toltecs of Central Mexico had died when Cortez arrived. “
I was not aware of that-—thanks for the info.
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The Spanish record makes it clear that the missions were established to maintain a port (at first a Monte Rey) so that Spanish merchant ships could resupply on the way to Mexico from the Philippines. Yes, they were concerned about the Russians and English getting there first but scurvy was a bigger problem for them.
All entrants into the mission system were voluntary.
But Serra and his thugs only inflicted death and destruction on the California Indians. They died by the tens of thousands of smallpox, just as the Aztecs and Toltecs of Central Mexico had died when Cortez arrived.
Here you are probably wrong. Smallpox apparently bypassed California, for reasons I explain here (do look at the reference bibliography, as it is extensive). The more deadly plagues began after the missions were established in tuberculosis, syphilis, and influenza. If you want a scholarly treatment on the topic, I suggest "A Time of Little Choice by Randall Milliken or Children of Coyote by Steven Hackel.
I wish to add that there was considerable strife between the Franciscans and the military people. The friars wished to "civilize" the Indians, developing trades so that they could make it in an industrializing world. They fought for Indian land claims against the civil authorities. A surprising number of the descendants of mission Indians live in Monterey County today, from which there is some reconsideration of their demographic losses in progress.
It may have been the Mexican "secularization" process that killed more Indians than even during the mission period, as the colonists outside the missions were less directed to protecting Indians' rights and claims and were more likely to engage in the prostitution that spread the syphilis back to more remote tribal enclaves.