By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – Janet Bartel, chief docent at San Diego Mission, treads as carefully as a performer on a tightrope when discussing the Kumeyaay Indian experience at Mission San Diego, There have been too many controversies not to.
In September 1988, Pope John Paul II beatified Father Junipero Serra saying that the missionary’s “great goal was to bring the Gospel to the Native People of America, so that they too might be consecrated in the truth.”
On the other hand Rupert Costo, a Cahuilla Indian, wrote The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide. The book offers the view that at the missions established by Serra, Native Americans were systematically deprived of their culture and dignity, beaten unmercifully for infractions of the rules, and sometimes killed.
The website of the California Historical Society online tells of Pablo Tac, Victoria, and Lorenzo Asisaro testifying to Catholic authorities about their lives respectively at Mission San Luis Rey, Mission San Gabriel and Mission Santa Cruz.
Tac was the most positive, expressing “thanks to God for the coming of the missionaries to his country. He did observe, however, that thousands of his people died ‘as a result of the sickness that came to California.’
On the other hand, Victoria, a Tongva raised at Mission San Gabriel, said that “mission life was filled with misery, humiliation and terror. She reported that the missionaries punished an Indian woman who had a miscarriage by having her head shaved, by being flogged every day for fifteen days, and by wearing iron shackles on her feet for three months and by ‘having to appear every Sunday in church, on the steps leading up to the altar, with a hideous painted wooden child in her arms.’
And Asisaro said: “The Indians at the missions were very severely treated by the padres, often punished by fifty lashes on the bare back. They were governed somewhat in the military style, having sergeants, corporals and overseers, who were Indians, and they reported to the padres any disobedience or infraction of the rules, and then came the last without mercy, the women the same as the men. The lash was made of rawhide.”
To date, Serra has not been eligible for canonization—a process that requires documentation of two miracles attributable to Serra’s intercession. Beatification requires one miracle, and one was attested to by Sister Mary Boniface Dryda of St. Louis, Missouri, who said her prayers to Serra resulted in her being cured of lupus—a claim Vatican examiners found to have merit. Although others have subsequently stepped forward to claim miraculous results from prayers to Serra, no reported incident has yet been validated by the church as a second miracle.
With sainthood pending, and opposition to Serra among his critics unabated, Bartel knows that she must be circumspect in what she says, lest a slip of the tongue provoke another controversy.
There have been controversies large and small between Mission San Diego and Native Americans, Bartel explained.
In one, Mission San Diego planned to construct a building on the grassy side of the central quadrangle. However, archaeologists said there were bones on the property and notified local monitors for Native Americans. Bartel said it was entirely possible that the bones were those of 19th century U.S. military personnel who were stationed at the mission after the United States captured California in the Mexican-American War of 1846. But rather than have a drawn out controversy, the church decided to simply cover over that portion of the Mission property, and construct the building on another portion where there was no such controversy.
Even construction of an ewa’a—the temporary shelter that Kumeyaay Indians used to build during their migrations along the San Diego River—was not without controversy, Bartel said. It turned out that the man who built the ewa’a for the Mission, while of Native American descent, was not a Kumeyaay, prompting protests.
On another occasion, she said, a guide provoked ire by telling a group that there were fleas at the Mission, and that Kumeyaay sometimes would burn down their ewa’as as a pragmatic form of pest control. That should have come as no surprise, said Bartel, as there were fleas all over San Diego County. One area of Camp Pendleton, for example, is called “Las Pulgas,” – Spanish for “the fleas.”
Bartel said that in any project that the Mission does now concerning the Kumeyaay, it seeks advice from representatives of the local tribe.
Besides the ewa’a, one can find in the quadrangle the Kumeyaay equivalents of mortars and pestles, known in Spanish as metates y manos. Kumeyaay culture also is represented in the Mission’s museum, where tightly woven baskets are on display. In the Meditation Garden, Indian neophytes who died during the mission are memorialized by crosses made from building materials from the original Mission San Diego.
When the Franciscan padres arrived in San Diego, the Kumeyaay were “hunters and gatherers, and fairly nomadic,” Bartel said. “They would get the small animals and they would fish. Occasionally when they were in the mountains they would catch a deer but a problem was that they had no means of meat preservation, so they would have to kill it, prepare it and eat it.
“To me, the Kumeyaay knew this land like no one else ever could have known it. They might not have been agriculturalists; they didn’t grow things, but the things that grew wild they knew how to propagate,” Bartel added. “They knew what to do with the wild berries and things like that. Sometimes it seems like the food was not plentiful, other times it was very plentiful. But I think it is important to know that the Spaniards were the ones who planted the first seeds of agriculture here in San Diego” – creating the foundation “for what turned out to be a great agricultural state – California.”
Of charges that Native Americans were forced to live at the missions, Bartel said that whatever may have happened at the other 20 missions, such was not the case at Mission San Diego, where there was no room for a permanent work force to reside. Instead the Kumeyaay came to the mission for eight days at a time, and then went back to their villages. “We have more than enough documentation to support the fact that it was definitely a rotating system here,” she said.
What attracted the Kumeyaay to the missions? The chief guide was asked.
Bartel responded that they were drawn by the advances in agriculture, food preparation, and technology. Whereas the Kumeyaay wore clothes of animal skins or plant material, Spaniards had brightly colored textiles. Whereas the Kumeyaay built rafts, the Spaniards had comparatively large ships.
At the missions, she said the Kumeyaay were taught to sew and to sow – they learned to stitch together clothing and to plant crops. They were taught the blacksmith trade. They were introduced to such livestock as cattle and horses.
They also were introduced to Christianity.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World; his story ran previously on www.examiner.com