[News] The Canonization of Junípero Serra and The Race for Innocence

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/10/the-canonization-of-junpero-serra-and-the-race-for-innocence.html* 



  The Canonization of Junípero Serra and The Race for Innocence

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz 
<http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/10/the-canonization-of-junipero-serra-and-the-race-for-innocence.html>

/All this month, get your copy of /An Indigenous People's History of the 
United States 
<http://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Peoples-History-ReVisioning-American/dp/0807057835/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443642173&sr=1-1&keywords=an+indigenous+peoples%27+history+of+the+united+states+roxanne+dunbar-ortiz>/ at 
a special ebook rate./

In 1988, Pope John Paul II beatified Junípero Serra, the first step to 
canonization. In the wake of the Red Power movement of the 1970s and the 
International Indigenous Movement that followed, there was a strong 
outcry from California Indigenous descendants of those who perished of 
overwork, starvation, and outright killing in the Franciscan missions 
that the hands-on Serra created. The Franciscans, not the Spanish state, 
were the actual first colonizers of California Indians, by forcibly 
relocating them from their traditional territories and villages to labor 
for the Franciscans in the missions, making the order wealthy from the 
products produced there. Indigenous peoples’ who are involved in UN 
human rights work raised a ruckus in the UN system, and friendly Human 
Rights NGOs and formerly colonized member-states and liberation 
movements lobbied the Vatican at the UN to not canonize a notorious 
colonizer. That was twenty-seven years ago, and Serra was not brought up 
for sainthood, such a notion being clearly unacceptable. Then, to the 
shock of the California descendants, in May 2015, the new and admired 
Pope Francis took Serra off the shelf where he was meant to stay, 
gathering dust, and announced canonization 
<http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pope-visit-serra-20150923-story.html>, 
trying to pass him off as a Latin American, or US American, apparently 
not having received the memo that the Spanish empire was overthrown by 
the Mexican people in a ten-year war to drive them out. California was a 
part of Mexico. One of the first acts of the independent Mexican 
government was to secularize society, sending the Franciscans packing, 
closing all the missions.

Twenty-one Franciscan missions were established along the Pacific Coast 
of California between 1769 and 1823. The establishment of the missions 
and Spanish army bases (presidios) from San Diego and Los Angeles and 
Santa Barbara to Carmel, San Francisco, and Sonoma, traces the initial 
colonization of a large region of California’s Indigenous peoples. The 
five-hundred-mile road that connected the missions from San Francisco to 
San Diego was called, and is still called today, El Camino Real, the 
Royal Highway.

The Spanish military in California was divided into four districts, each 
with Franciscan missions and strategically located army bases. The 1769 
establishment of the first army base in San Diego coincided with the 
establishment of the first Franciscan mission in California, a pattern 
that continued.

These California Franciscan missions and their founder, Junípero Serra, 
are extravagantly romanticized by modern California settlers and remain 
popular tourist sites. Very few visitors notice, however, that in the 
middle of the plaza of each mission is a whipping post. The history 
symbolized by that artifact is not dead and buried with the generations 
of Indigenous bodies buried under the California crust. The scars and 
trauma have been passed on from generation to generation. Putting salt 
in the wound, as it were, Pope Francis canonized Serra in Washington, DC 
on Wednesday, September 23, 2015, not quietly, rather in the context of 
a rock star reception publicized around the world, with masses of people 
and US government officials present, announcing to all that the Doctrine 
of Discovery 
<http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/08/the-doctrine-of-discovery.html> 
continues to guide Vatican, European, and US imperialism.

California Indigenous peoples are insulted and bereaved by this act that 
celebrates genocide; they have long organized to prevent the 
sanctification of an actor who is an exponent of rape, torture, death, 
starvation, and humiliation of their ancestors and the attempted 
destruction of their cultures. Everyone who abhors colonialism, slavery 
and the slave trade, racism, and genocide should be equally insulted. 
Fifty California Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples across the 
country and around the world have rightly condemned the canonization of 
Serra 
<http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/09/23/3704871/junipero-serra-native-americans-protest/>.

In principle, it does not matter whether Serra was, as the pope 
erroneously describes him, a gentle protector of the Indians, or the 
fact that he was a brutal colonizer; it’s Spanish colonization per se, 
or any European colonization of the past five hundred years, that should 
not be celebrated, just as Columbus should not be celebrated, or King 
Leopold or Andrew Jackson. However, Serra was known to be the architect 
of the colonizing project, with the army at his bidding. He accompanied 
the soldiers, randomly kidnapping Indigenous individuals and families, 
particularly children, recording these captures in his diaries. With the 
Franciscan mission system, the Native population of the Central Valley 
and coastal areas was reduced by half, and disease was only one factor, 
itself the result of malnutrition and filthy living conditions.

California Indigenous peoples resisted Serra’s colonialist totalitarian 
order. These insurgent actions are also recorded in official records and 
diaries, but they seem to have interested few historians until the civil 
rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, when California Indigenous peoples 
began to do their own research. They found that no mission escaped 
uprisings from within or attacks from outside by communities of the 
imprisoned along with escapees. Indigenous guerrilla forces of up to two 
thousand formed. Without this resistance, there would be no descendants 
of the California Native peoples of the area colonized by the Spanish. 
Let us celebrate that resistance, not the oppressor.

With mass exodus from the Catholic Church, the Vatican under Pope 
Francis has ramped up its missionization project in light of the sex 
abuse scandals and its continued contempt for women’s autonomy and 
rights, undermining the righteous goals of Vatican II to support 
Indigenous Peoples struggles for liberation rather than proselytizing. 
He argues that the Catholic church and the Franciscan order were somehow 
separate from Spanish colonization, when, in fact, the Vatican, a 
nation-state then and now, initiated and validated the Atlantic slave 
trade (Papal Bull of 1455 that allowed the Portuguese monarchy to occupy 
and enslave West Africans) and the violent occupation and enslavement of 
the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Papal Bulls of 1493-1494, 
blessing Columbus’s continued colonization of the Caribbean, granting 
the western hemisphere to the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies for 
colonization and forced conversion of the colonized), this comprising 
the /Doctrine of Discovery/, which was and is Christian canon law and is 
the law of the settler states of the Americas that still controls Native 
nations, including the United States.

/To read more about America's Indigenous history, click here 
<http://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Peoples-History-ReVisioning-American/dp/0807057835/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443642173&sr=1-1&keywords=an+indigenous+peoples%27+history+of+the+united+states+roxanne+dunbar-ortiz> for 
the ebook special and get /An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United 
States/ for $2.99 all October./

*About the Author *

*Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz* grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a 
tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the 
international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is 
known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social 
justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of 
California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native 
American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and 
helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 
1977 book /The Great Sioux Nation/ was the fundamental document at the 
first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, 
held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the 
author or editor of seven other books, including /Roots of Resistance: A 
History of Land Tenure in New Mexico/ 
<http://www.reddirtsite.com/bk-roots-1.htm>. She lives in San Francisco. 
Follow her on Twitter at *@rdunbaro* <http://twitter.com/rdunbaro>.

-- 
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