|
|
|
Book Review
| Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. By Steven W. Hackel. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xx + 476 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, glossary, appendices, notes, index. $59.95, cloth; $22.50, paper.)
|
|
Steve Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis surpasses expectation. It is a challenge to summarize in a few words the wonderful stories and insights in this lucidly written and extensively researched monograph. Numerous maps, illustrations, tables, and appendices add further nuance and detail to the finely wrought text. The book's length may be demanding, but it is rewarding for its depth of research. |
1
|
|
Hackel focuses on Native experiences in the Spanish missions of Alta California, using as his primary case study Mission San Carlos Borromeo in the area of Monterey. At the same time, he incorporates evidence from other missions throughout Alta California as well as interweaving comparisons with other northern provinces of New Spain, including New Mexico, Sonora, Texas, and Florida. Too, this well balanced study frames the narratives of local Indian-Spanish encounters within the context of evolving Spanish rule and ideology at different levels of provincial and imperial policy making. Hackel must work with sources that tell him little about Indian lives and cultures before European contact, but he has ably plumbed mission sacramental registers, records of military officers and Franciscan missionaries, and Indian testimonies contained within judicial proceedings to sketch the outlines of Native values and practices as they evolved after contact. |
2
|
|
This is primarily a story of how Indian experiences of, and responses to, disease and population decline shaped all aspects of religious, political, and economic change that followed their encounter with Europeans. More specifically, Hackel explores what he terms "dual revolutions" brought by Spaniards to Native lands in California—first, the biological forces of European pathogens that brought death and demographic collapse and second, the ecological forces of European plants, weeds, and domesticated animals that caused environmental degradation and subsistence crisis. Together, they radically reshaped the world within which Native peoples struggled to survive in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In turn, the dual revolutions influenced Indian-Spanish relations in the missions. Religious indoctrination was undermined by the fact that most of those enumerated in baptism lists died before reaching adulthood and mission populations were maintained through constant recruitment not natural increase. Franciscans' aggressive attempts to change Native patterns of intimacy, marriage, and reproduction vied with skewed gender ratios, infant mortality, and entanglements with Spanish soldiers and settlers that occasioned intermarriage or rape and sexual assault. The dual revolutions created economic interdependency between Spanish and Indian populations in and outside the missions over Native labor and Spanish demand for it while the imposition of Spanish criminal justice brought another level of violent strife and coercion to Indian lives. |
3
|
|
Hackel concludes by discussing the secularization of the missions in the nineteenth century when Indian peoples gained independence but continued to use missions as a center for social activity and community as well as looking at the persistence and memory of Indians in present-day Monterey. Indians could do little to stave off the decimation of their own people from European diseases and had to seek opportunity and survival in the very economic, legal, and political systems that oppressed them. Yet this is no simple tale of the destructive nature of colonialism; the complexity of Native efforts to achieve independent lives and to retain their historical identity stand as testament to their significance in California's past and its present. |
4
|
| Juliana Barr
|
| University of Florida |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
ISSN 1939-8603
|