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<div style="display: block;" id="reader-header" class="header"> <b><small><small><small><a
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/10/the-canonization-of-junpero-serra-and-the-race-for-innocence.html"
id="reader-domain" class="domain"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/10/the-canonization-of-junpero-serra-and-the-race-for-innocence.html">http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/10/the-canonization-of-junpero-serra-and-the-race-for-innocence.html</a></a></small></small></small></b>
<h1 id="reader-title">The Canonization of Junípero Serra and The
Race for Innocence</h1>
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<p>By <a title="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. She lives in San
Francisco." target="_self"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/10/the-canonization-of-junipero-serra-and-the-race-for-innocence.html">Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz</a></p>
<p><em>All this month, get your copy of </em><a
target="_blank"
href="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">An
Indigenous People's History of the United States</a><em> at
a special ebook rate.</em></p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pope-visit-serra-20150923-story.html">announced
canonization</a>, 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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2015/08/the-doctrine-of-discovery.html">Doctrine
of Discovery</a> continues to guide Vatican, European,
and US imperialism.</p>
<p>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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2015/09/23/3704871/junipero-serra-native-americans-protest/">rightly
condemned the canonization of Serra</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
<em>Doctrine of Discovery</em>, 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.</p>
<p><em>To read more about America's Indigenous history,
click <a target="_blank"
href="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">here</a> for
the ebook special and get </em>An Indigenous Peoples'
History of the United States<em> for $2.99 all October.</em></p>
<p><strong>About the Author </strong></p>
<p><strong> Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz</strong> 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 <em>The Great Sioux Nation</em> 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 <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.reddirtsite.com/bk-roots-1.htm"><em>Roots
of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New
Mexico</em></a>. She lives in San Francisco. Follow
her on Twitter at <a target="_blank"
href="http://twitter.com/rdunbaro"><strong>@rdunbaro</strong></a>.</p>
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