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Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769â?"1936
By Lisbeth Haas UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 1995 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-91844-3
CHAPTER 1
Indio and Juaneño, De Razón and Californio
In 1775 on the site that would soon become Mission San Juan Capistrano, soldiers and a Spanish lieutenant constructed, raised, and venerated a large cross; then the missionary Father Lasuén prepared an altar and said the Catholic mass. By this ceremony the Spaniards declared formal possession of the land of the Acâgchemem for the Spanish crown. The site chosen for the mass, significantly, was one that symbolized the independence of the Acâgchemem from surrounding Indian peoples. It was here that they had named themselves, thus defining their autonomy from the Pubuiem, and that they had declared their territorial sovereignty from the Pubuiem's land, a territory to the north that was claimed by Mission San Gabriel in 1771 and further colonized in 1781 with the founding of El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles. The missionary's selection of this site illustrates a deliberate strategy used by the Spaniards in their conquest of the Americas, one that had served them well already for three centuries prior to the conquest of this area of California. By choosing such locally meaningful places for their own rituals of appropriation, the missionaries attempted to replace indigenous structures of authority, power, and memory with their own. This process of superimposition was reflected in the mission's initial name of San Juan Capistrano de Quanís-savit, which acknowledged the Acâgchemem as a people who came from savit yet at the same time declared San Juan Capistrano their patron saint.
This act of taking formal possession of the lands of the Acâgchemem initiated a process of colonization that would subsume a five-hundred-square-mile territory of roughly five thousand people in fifteen villages scattered from the sea to the mountains. Conquest of these people necessarily involved their conversion to Catholicism. In accord with the Law of the Indies that regulated the American colonies, the mission held the territory of the converts in trust, to be returned to them once they had adopted Spanish social, cultural, linguistic, and economic behaviors. Generally the converts resided within the mission compound, yet in San Juan Capistrano some converts (called indio neofitos [neophytes] or Juaneños, after the mission) remained with the unconverted, or gentile, Indians in the countryside, in villages that were claimed as "Villages of this mission" less than a generation after the mission was founded. The coexistence of mission compound and native settlements, converted and unconverted villagers, and colonial cultural, political, and material practices and persistent indigenous practices and beliefs, defines the complex, multicultural and multilingual society of the mission period.
Violence toward the Acâgchemem and other indigenous peoples was a constant element of this society from the conquest forward. The missionaries came with soldiers, who used force to put down any overt resistance to their presence. Soldiers raped Indian women and committed other atrocities that created fear and reticence on the part of indigenous people who had initially welcomed them, and engendered multiple revolts against the missions and presidios. Steady demographic decline of the Acâgchemem, the result in large measure of plagues (in any given year, one-tenth of the mission population might be wiped out), created painful scars of conquest, which survivors had to negotiate as they struggled to shape and explain their collective place within colonial society.
With the exception of a young man named Pablo Tac, mission Indians left no written trace of how they understood their position in the missions. Tac's manuscript identifies the most important features of conquest and mission life as he saw them. Pablo Tac was born at the Mission of San Luis Rey de Francia in 1822. San Luis Rey had been founded in 1798, twenty-two years after the founding of San Juan Capistrano, and encompassed the territory of the Quechnajuichom, immediately to the south of the Acâgchemem. The brief story of how Tac came to write his manuscript is instructive, for it explains quite a bit about how California mission Indians fit into the colonial order.
When Pablo Tac was eleven years old, a missionary from San Luis Rey chose to take him to Rome with another Luiseño youth, Agapito Amamix. Once there, they began a four-year course in Latin, though Amamix died before completing it. Pablo Tac lived on to study rhetoric, humanities, and philosophy in Rome. Despite a severe case of smallpox he contracted as a teenager, Tac survived to the age of twenty. At his death he left for the chief custodian of the Vatican Library the manuscript and a grammar of his native language. The presence of these two youths in Rome is reminiscent of the first appearance of Americans in the sixteenth-century Spanish court and the ensuing procession of New World goods that so revolutionized Europe. More than three centuries had passed, however, since those early military and religious conquests of indigenous empires and societies throughout the Americas. In nineteenth-century Rome, Tac and his fellow students from elsewhere in the Americas, Africa, and Asia represented distant peoples whose histories had long been marked by colonial domination.
The colonizing process described in Tac's manuscript reflects the complex history of conquest in all the Spanish Americas. In the sixteenth century, in the heart of the Spanish American empire in central Mexico, similar treatises were written by members of a native intelligentsia who were well versed in numerous autochthonous languages and who had learned Latin, Greek, and Spanish as well. Though they worked under the supervision and vigilance of Spaniards, their intention in recording their histories and the history of the conquest was to create records that embodied a knowledge of their pasts, since most records had been violently destroyed by the conquerors. Pablo Tac's treatise is but a sketch in comparison with these works, which were informed by well-established indigenous traditions of graphic expression. Tac's society had not previously recorded its history pictographically. His is, moreover, the first literary text produced by a native of the Californias.
Although Pablo Tac's manuscript was titled Conversión de los San Luiseños de la Alta California, it is important not for its discussion of conversion, which, according to Tac, was something that simply followed once the missionary and Spanish soldiers were given permission to stay in the territory, but for Tac's descriptions of the land, people, and structure of mission society and for his use of language. Consider, for example, this passage:
When the missionary arrived with a few people to our Country, our Chief and the others, seeing them from afar, were alarmed, but they didn't flee or take up arms to kill them, but rather sat and watched them. When they came near, the chief stood up (because he was seated with the others) and met them. They stopped, and the missionary began to speak. The chief perhaps said in his language, "Hichsom iva haluon, puluchajam cham quinai" "What are you looking for? Leave our country," but they did not understand him. They responded in Spanish. The chief began to use signs, and the Franciscan understood him, gave him presents, and in this manner befriended him. The chief returned to his people (so I believe) and, judging the whites favorably, allowed them to sleep here.
Pablo Tac addressed thanks to God for this happy day when his ancestors—"[we] called Sosabitom"—first saw the white people. He then goes on, in a brief paragraph, to discuss their subsequent "conversion":
The Franciscan Father stayed in our Country; with the few people he brought he made a camp, and here he lived for many days, saying mass in the morning and afterward discussing with himself how he would baptize them, where he would put his House, the Church, and what he would do with five thousand souls (the number of Indians). How he would accomplish this and their sustenance. Having the chief for a friend, he wasn't afraid of anything. It was a great blessing that the Indians didn't kill the Spaniards when they arrived, and very admirable, because they never wanted other People to live with them, because until those days they were at war.
In these passages Tac provides a clear statement about the territorial integrity of his "Country" (Pays in the Spanish original) and the autonomy of his "People" (Gente). He calls the villages in which the five thousand people lived "countries" (payses, lower cased). His terminology and his story of encounter suggest the exact way in which the land was divided and exclusively possessed by groups of villages, village nobility, and individual villagers and the relatively insular society that resulted.
The encounter that Tac describes took place in 1798, comparatively late in the history of the southern California missions, and he treats it rather matter-of-factly, noting no open resistance. At the same time, he neglects to mention similar encounters among neighboring groups—including the Acâgchemem, with whom Tac's people shared social, cultural, linguistic, and political ideas and organizations. Perhaps Tac's simplification of the story of encounter, and the absence in his account of any discussion of violent resistance or of the colonization of surrounding lands, reflects not only the ideas of an exemplary convert, but also the conscious determination by the village leaders that revolt, as experiences at other missions had shown, would be fruitless. The colonization of surrounding lands also explains why conversions at San Luis Rey took place at a relatively quick pace: over two hundred Indians of all ages were baptized in the first six months of San Luis Rey's existence, in contrast to twenty-four persons, mostly children, who were baptized in the first two years at San Juan Capistrano.
As Tac notes, the division of Quechla (his people's territory) into a "Country" and "countries," or villages, reflects a larger political division of land. The adjoining territories of the Quechla and the Acâgchemem stretched from sea level to six thousand feet in the Sierra Santa Ana, and Quechla territory alone covered approximately one thousand square miles. Each Acâgchemem and Quechnajuichom village possessed sites in every ecological zone from the ocean to the mountains, so that they had continual access to specific hunting, gathering, and fishing areas. Subsistence activities were generally conducted within a day's walk from the village. Foods included game, coastal marine animals, and freshwater fish; six species of acorns; various seeds, greens, and cactuses; and bulbs, roots, and tree fungi. Teas, tobacco, and datura were used for medicinal cures and sacred rituals, and some of these were also cultivated in private gardens. Among villagers, land was acknowledged to be the property of an individual, a family, the chief, or the group collectively. This property was inherited patrilineally, and it could be passed by the owner to anyone of his choosing. Trespassing onto individual property and taking its resources brought severe penalty, sometimes even death. Trespassing onto communal property by members of other villages or groups was cause for the warring that Tac discussed. War and marriage expanded Acâgchemem and Quechnajuichom territory.
This complex ordering of place sustained the social relations that defined power and knowledge. Because each sedentary and autonomous village was headed by certain ruling families, intermarriage between these families interlocked the various villages. Each village, moreover, was made up of persons who were patrilineally related. Political authority and most forms of religious knowledge were embodied in the chief of the village and a general council, or puplem, composed only of men. Knowledge of all historical, religious, and practical affairs related to food, war, medicine, and the production of goods was passed from these male elders to young men, usually to a son, son-in-law, or nephew who had demonstrated an ability to absorb this knowledge and power. The position of chief was inherited by the first-born son or, if no heir existed, the chief's nearest male relative; a wife or daughter could act as chief if the male heir was not yet old enough to rule. An heir could be bypassed for the next in line if he was considered unworthy or lacking the appropriate qualities to rule.
In Tac's account we see how the mission undermined this political ordering of space and brought baptized and unconverted villagers alike under its control. Although Tac was born at the mission and was considered a model convert, his focus on work and authority reveals his sensitivity to this experience of subjugation. The missionaries, he states, relied on Spanish soldiers on horseback to maintain discipline and order. But to establish their influence deep in the Country they used native alcaldes, who acted as mediators between missionaries and Indian populations and as spokesmen for the Indians, and who wielded multiple kinds of authority that had been granted to them by the missionaries. (As elsewhere in the New World, the symbol of these alcaldes' power was the cane.) The alcaldes at San Luis Rey, Tac explains, were appointed because they knew some Spanish and their behavior was considered appropriate. Often, however, alcaldes were appointed because they already held positions of authority or because, as Tac notes, they were able to move between cultural systems easily. Their main task, in Tac's eyes, was to judge, punish, and control other Indians. The chief (who appears in Tac's account as a single person, suggesting the disappearance of the preconquest system in which a chief headed each Luiseño village) dressed like a Spaniard to symbolize his noble place, but, Tac states, he no longer had the authority over his people that he had once had. Instead he and the alcaldes served to extend the authority of the missionary into the countryside.
Every afternoon the alcaldes would travel to the mission from their villages to report on that day's events and to receive orders for the next day. Passing through other villages on their way back to their own, they would broadcast these orders, calling out in their native language: "Tomorrow the harvest begins! Laborers should gather at the chicken yard." The following day a Spanish overseer and the alcaldes would go to the fields to supervise the day's work: as Tac put it, "The lazy would be hurried, and those guilty of slow work or leaving their task would be punished."
Tac, a second-generation neophyte, was taken as a boy to Rome because of his exemplary knowledge, abilities, and Christian belief. Yet in his manuscript his strong sense of identity as Quechnajuis is clear. Tac wrote his account in Spanish and used Spanish words when he wanted to describe the colonized social identities and experiences of the "Luiseños" and "SanJuaneños" (the converted Indians of Mission San Juan Capistrano), names fully grounded in the mission experience. Tac emphasizes that only the Franciscans referred to the region as San Luis Rey; his people, by contrast, called the local territory (including the mission itself) Quechla, after the name of a stone found in their country. We, he states, "call ourselves Quechnajuichom in plural, Quechnajuis in singular, that means the inhabitants of quechla."
Tac's treatise, in essence, defines the complex social identities that developed among California's mission Indian populations through conquest and colonization. As a Quechnajuis, he expresses obliquely through his own language some of the deeper understandings of his people and their historic place; as a Luiseño, he describes his world as having been shaped by two generations of mission life. And while Tac speaks favorably of a contact that "took us out of our miseries," he inscribes into history the memory of the demographic disaster that followed, stating that two thousand of his people died as a "result of a sickness that came to California." He also notes that many chose to leave "for the woods" rather than endure conquest. Tac's approach to this story of conversion and his use of language denote a quiet resistance to the humiliations of conquest, particularly the renaming practices that threatened group history and identity. In his own way, he makes clear the vulnerabilities that he and other Quechnajuichom and Luiseños experienced as they negotiated their past and present as mission Indians. With these negotiations in mind, let us now return to the processes of conquest and colonization among the Acâgchemem.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769â?"1936 by Lisbeth Haas. Copyright © 1995 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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