The "Missionized" Indians in California*

From their diaries and letters we know that the Spanish fathers viewed the California Indians as lost children, incapable of understanding beyond a simple level. Further, they saw them as lost souls, doomed to eternal suffering unless converted and baptized. The priests were appalled at the nearly naked Indians, smeared with mud to keep out the cold, living on acorn mush, in huts made of reeds. They saw themselves as inspired rescuers. Their plan was to clothe the Indians and teach them to weave cloth to improve their diet and teach them to raise beans, corn, and fruit; to build permanent houses and teach them to make adobe bricks. This plan would take about ten years, the padres calculated, then the Christian Indians would settle their families on small farms, effectively colonizing California. The saving of their souls would proceed at the same time.

Fear and fascination were the means for saving souls. The adobe walls of the mission were painted with the glories of heaven emblazoned above, and below, fiery scenes of explicit tortures reserved for the damned. The recruited neophytes were quick to learn the Lord's Prayer in Spanish and to follow the rituals of the mass. In return they were free to roam within the confines of the mission, where they attended services and found the music of bells, flutes and a small violin captivating. Missionary zeal can best be understood as the padres' conception of an inspired rescue effort: overcome all obstacles and save the Indians from the observed hardships of this world and the certain tortures of the next.

After the death of Father Serra in August 1784, followed by the departure of Father Palou for Mexico, life for the Indian converts at Mission Bay became more and more repressive. Diego de Borica, one of the most enlightened governors of California, began to look into complaints from Father J.M. Fernandez. After sleepless nights and much worry, he had written that in 1795, 203 Indians died and 200 escaped at San Francisco. The Indians were compelled to do excessive work, handcuffed, imprisoned and beaten for the most trivial offences. "When the miserable Indians, learning too late that their former gentile life, even with its precariousness, was far preferable to Christianization . . . they attempted to regain their freedom by flight. They were hunted down and punished with tenfold vigor."

The Indians left the San Francisco mission at every opportunity. It is from the accounts of a handful of visitors, perhaps ten in all, that we know how the Spanish tried and failed. It should be remembered that these observers of San Francisco's mission, much as they deplored the means and effect of religious conversion, looked upon the California Indians in their natural state as uncivilized and in need of help. Accounts written after 1815 began to list the grim statistics of Indian death by disease: measles, cholera, smallpox and "the disease given them by the Spanish soldiers" or syphilis. One account in 1816 stated ". . . of the 1000 Indians in San Francisco, 300 die annually. . ." By 1833, only 204 converted Indians were left at Mission Bay.

In 1806, G.H. von Landsdorff, a German doctor who accompanied Nicolai Rezanov on a Russian expedition to northern California, described the Indian dances:

In their dances the Indians remain almost always in the same place, endeavoring, partly with their bows and arrows, partly with the feathers they hold in their hands and wear on their heads, and also by measured springs, by different movements of their bodies, and by facial contortions, to imitate scenes of battle or of domestic life. Their music consists of singing and clapping with a stick at one end. The women have their own particular song, and their own particular way of dancing. They hop about near the men, but never in time with them. Their principal action is in pressing the abdomen with the thumb and forefinger, first to one side and then to the other.

*Excerpted from An Unvanished Story: 5,500 Years of History in San Francisco

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