Some of my ancestors used to practice ritual human sacrifice, killing their children, and poisoning each other, until they got converted to Christianity by missionaries in the 1820s. Until the missionaries showed up and told the women to “keep their pants on,” they were being decimated by venereal diseases being spread by sailors among the native population. The missionaries stopped all that.
And yet now the missionaries get excoriated for “cultural imperialism.”
I read that the native Hawaiian religion had lots of taboos. When the sailors started showing up and completely ignored the taboos, with no bad consequences, that caused a collapse of the belief in the traditional religion...shortly before the arrival of Protestant missionaries from New England.
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. True, once in, they were not allowed to leave --- but they knew that when they joined. Just like the military or any other ""institution" in those days.
They acquired literacy and manual skills; they prayed; they had families --- the sanctity of marriage was honored and respected --- and they cared for their children; 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 worse!
There was no money, because neither the California Indians nor the Franciscans had a money economy: they had a monastic 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 mission chain taken away from the Franciscans.
And that's what happened.
Eventually the Indians ended up as serfs on the haciendas, and sexual consorts for the soldiers, but this was not Serra's doing. He strove, labored hard and suffered much to obtain the well-being and redemption of the California Indians all his life. In this tumultuous contact of two civilizations (Spanish and Indian) that the Spanish seized the ascendancy was inevitable; but the way they did it was unconscionable. Serra was on the outs with the colonial military power structure and did everything he knew how to protect and prosper 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.