Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kent G. Lightfoot is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Prehistoric Political Dynamics: A Case Study from the American Southwest (1984), among other books.

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Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants

University of California Press

Chapter One

Voices of the past become muted over time. Such is the case with thetelling of California's colonial history. We accentuate Spanishrecollections that indelibly mark the contemporary landscape with MissionRevival buildings, reconstructed missions and presidios, place names, andeven Taco Bell restaurants. But the full diversity and significance of thestate's colonial past has been lost in the hustle and bustle of ourtwenty-first-century world. An eerie silence pervades the memories ofthousands of native peoples and Russian colonists who, like the Spanish,participated in the creation of the California frontiers. We tend toforget that this state was forged at the crossroads of the world, for itwas here that the extensive colonial domains of Imperial Spain and TsaristRussia first touched on the Pacific coast. The roots of our modern ethnicdiversity can be traced back to this colonial encounter among Indians,Spaniards, Mexicans, Russians, Native Alaskans, and many other peoples.

As the site of one of the last major colonial expansions of the SpanishCrown in the late 1700s, California became the northernmost province of avast empire that stretched across much of southern North America, CentralAmerica, and South America. By 1812, California was also the southernmostfrontier of an extensive Russian mercantile enterprise centered in theNorth Pacific (see map 1). With the coming of the Russians, the fertilecoastal shores of central California were transformed into the borderlandsof two distinctive colonial domains. A chain of Franciscan missions andpresidios, extending from San Diego to the greater San Francisco Bay,emerged as the cornerstone of the Spanish colonial enterprise in whatbecame known as Alta California. But just beyond the northern reaches ofthe Presidio of San Francisco, Russian workers felled redwood to build theimpressive palisade walls and stout log structures of Ross-theadministrative center of the first mercantile colony in California. Intransforming the region into a unique contact zone in North America,Spanish and Russian colonists populated the coastal landscape with theirown distinctive adobe and Siberian-style wooden houses, churches, andforts and laid the foundations for two very different colonial programs.

Caught within and between the Spanish and Russian colonies were thousandsof native peoples residing in a plethora of small communities that dottedthe coastal zone of southern and central California. As hunter-gathererpeoples, they made their living from both the sea and land by huntingmarine mammals and terrestrial game, fishing for coastal and freshwaterfishes, gathering edible plant foods, and collecting shellfish. Thesenative communities varied greatly in language, tribal affiliation,population, and settlement pattern, yet they had much in common in theirmaterial cultures, broader world views (religious practices, dances,ceremonies), trade networks, and subsistence pursuits. Most coastal groupswere organized into small polities, which have been traditionally definedby anthropologists as "tribelets," "village communities," or "tinynations." Anthropologists have grouped those individual polities of whichthe members spoke similar languages into broader ethnolinguistic units.The Spanish and later the Mexican colonial system incorporated nativepeoples from eight major language groups of coastal California: Miwok,Ohlone (Costanoan), Esselen, Salinan, Chumash, Gabrielino, Luiseqo, andDiegueqo. The Russian managers of Colony Ross interacted primarily withnative peoples who spoke Coast Miwok, Kashaya Pomo, and Southern Pomolanguages.

Missionary and Mercantile Colonies

The hunter-gatherer communities of the central and southern coasts ofCalifornia were initially incorporated into one or other of two kinds ofcolonial institutions-missionary and mercantile colonies.

Franciscan Missions

Spain relied on the Franciscan Order to manage the Indian population ofits northernmost frontier, where the padres implemented a plan totransform the coastal hunter-gatherer peoples into a peasant class ofneophyte Catholics. The Spanish, and later Mexican, colonial systemconsisted of twenty-one Franciscan missions, four military presidios, andthree civilian pueblos along the coastal zone of southern and centralCalifornia (map 2). The first mission and presidio were constructed in SanDiego in 1769. The last Franciscan mission, San Francisco Solano, waserected in Sonoma in 1823, after an independent Mexico had assumedpolitical control of Alta California. The Franciscan missions weredesigned from the outset to be the focal node of native and Hispanicinteractions in colonial California. The missions typically housed twopadres (the majority from Spain), a mission guard of six soldiers (most ofwhom were mestizos or mulattos of Spanish, African, and/or native ancestryfrom northern Mexico), and a thousand or more baptized Indians orneophytes recruited from nearby coastal villages and, in later years, frommore distant communities in the interior (e.g., the Great Central Valley).Situated within or near the central mission quadrangle was the adobechurch, convento or residence for the priests, dormitories and houses forneophytes, residential quarters for the mission soldiers, storerooms, workareas for the preparation and cooking of communal meals, and rooms forcraft production. Developed as agricultural centers, the outlying missionlands incorporated hundreds of hectares of fields bursting with wheat,barley, and corn, as well as smaller walled gardens and orchards.Thousands of head of cattle and sheep, grazing on open livestock range,dotted the agrarian mission landscape.

Colony Ross

The first mercantile colony in California was founded by theRussian-American Company, a commercial monopoly representing Russia'sinterests in the lucrative North Pacific fur trade. In establishing theRoss settlement in 1812, on the rugged coastline 110 kilometers north ofthe Spanish Presidio of San Francisco, the Russians created theadministrative and mercantile center of the Ross colonial district (orcounter). This counter eventually included a port at Bodega Bay (PortRumiantsev), three ranches or farms, and a hunting camp, or artel, on theFarallon Islands (map 2). Known collectively as Colony Ross, the districtserved as the California base for harvesting sea otter and fur seal pelts,for raising crops and livestock, and for producing manufactured goods-manyof the latter of which were traded, both legally and illegally, toFranciscan missions in return for wheat and barley. The Russian-AmericanCompany assembled an international, multiethnic workforce for itsCalifornia colony that included Russians, Creoles (persons of mixedRussian and native blood), and Native Alaskans. The company also recruitedlocal Pomo and Miwok Indians as laborers. The majority of the pluralisticpopulation resided at the Ross settlement, where the formidable redwoodlog stockade contained residences for the Russian managers and staff, abarracks for single men, an official quarters for visitors, kitchenfacilities, administrative offices, and storehouses. Beyond the walls ofthe stockade ethnic neighborhoods were established where other workersresided, including lower-class Russian and Creole craftspersons andlaborers, Native Alaskan sea-mammal hunters, and the Pomo and Miwok menand women who became part of the Ross community.

The Franciscan missions and Colony Ross exemplify two ways that Europeancolonial powers integrated local indigenous peoples into colonialinfrastructures. At the vanguard of colonial expansion across theAmericas, missions and fur trade outposts constituted the social settingswhere many North American Indians experienced their first sustainedinteractions with colonial agents. The arrival of missionaries andmerchants in native territory often preceded, by many years, the waves ofsettlers that poured across much of North America in search of land toestablish private homesteads, ranches, and farms. Because the settlementof California took place late in Spain's and Russia's colonial expansionin the Americas, both countries had many decades of experience in managingand overseeing native peoples in other regions, as well as in observingthe colonial practices of other European nations.

Missionary colonies in North America were founded by various Christiansects that sponsored evangelization among native peoples. A steady streamof missionaries representing many Protestant denominations, Roman Catholicorders (e.g., Franciscan, Jesuit, Dominican), and the Russian OrthodoxChurch descended upon Native American communities, commencing in the late1500s and 1600s, flowing rapidly across the Eastern Seaboard, the AmericanSouthwest, the American Southeast, and the North Pacific. Missionarycolonies soon became established in most of the North American colonialterritories of Spain, France, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, Britain.Even if somewhat suspicious of overzealous evangelists, Europeangovernments supported and even advocated missions in North America,because the missions offered a relatively inexpensive way to transform"wild" native peoples into a laboring class (see, e.g., Beaver1988:435-439; Brown 1992:26; Jackson and Castillo 1995:31-39; Wagner1998:443; and Weber 1992:242). Many missionary settlements were designedto be self-sufficient, with natives serving as a communal work force forconstructing the mission infrastructure (e.g., churches, residentialbuildings, agricultural features), for raising their own food (throughagriculture, gardening, and ranching), and for manufacturing their ownhousehold objects, clothing, and craft goods.

Significant theological differences permeated the policies and practicesof the missionary orders. But, in stepping back from this evangelicaldiversity, we see that what differentiated the missionary settlements fromother colonial institutions in North America was a focus on the two"c's"-conversion and civilization. Missionaries launched explicitenculturation programs designed to teach native peoples the Gospels,Christian worship, language skills, and the central importance of Europeanand Euro-American world views, life ways, and economic practices. Mostmissionaries not only strove to make their colonies self-sufficient butalso introduced European menus, dress, and crafts to indigenouspopulations.

Mercantile outposts, such as Colony Ross, were typically founded bycommercial companies that had in common an agenda of exploiting availableresources (land, animal, mineral, and people) for great profits. Thelucrative fur trade propelled many merchants to participate in theintensive harvesting of both terrestrial and marine mammals. Following thefirst European explorations of the Atlantic Coast and New Mexico in thelate 1500s and early 1600s, the fur trade shifted to the tributaries ofthe Upper Missouri, the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific Slope, as otherareas became overhunted. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, the fur tradewas dominated by British companies (Hudson's Bay Company, North WestCompany) and American enterprises (American Fur Company, Pacific FurCompany) in the United States and Canada, and by the Russian-AmericanCompany in the North Pacific. These companies hunted or trapped diverseland mammals for furs and skins, but the primary economic engine of theterrestrial fur trade was the beaver, the fur-wool of which was used inthe manufacture of hats for European and American gentlemen, from the1500s through the early 1800s. The maritime fur trade focused on thehunting of sea mammals, primarily sea otters and fur seals, along thePacific coast from Alaska to Baja California.

Like the missionaries, the merchants focused also on Indians. Theydepended on native peoples for economic success, using them to procure andprocess furs and exploiting them as porters and manual laborers. But incontrast to the administrators of mission colonies, the businessmen whomanaged mercantile companies put little emphasis on directing the path ofculture change among native groups. The primary reason that mercantilecompanies interacted with natives was not to transform their values andcultures; it was to exploit them as cheap labor. Thus, although missionsmeasured success as a colonial endeavor by the number of nativeconversions and by the inroads made in modifying "pagan" life ways,mercantile colonies measured success by the economic bottom line-profitsgenerated for owners and stockholders.

Colonial Consequences

Since missionary and mercantile colonies were founded on fundamentallydifferent principles, the two types of colonial programs instituteddiffering policies and practices for the treatment and administration ofnative peoples; native entanglements with the missionaries and merchantsappear to have produced divergent trajectories of culture change. Thecentral questions I pose are twofold. How did native negotiations withinthe Franciscan missions and Colony Ross transform the natives' tribalorganizations, cultural practices, and Indian identities? And how didthese cultural transformations ultimately influence which native groupswould become federally recognized in the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries?

At first glance, the answers to these questions may seem prettystraightforward. The Franciscans have been portrayed in the academicliterature as highly destructive to traditional native cultures, incontrast to the more benevolent Russian merchants. The Franciscanmissionary program has been viewed and depicted as either white or black,seldom with shades of gray. Written descriptions of the Californiamissions have focused on variations of the "white legend" or the "blacklegend," either ennobling the missionaries for their personal sacrificesor vilifying them as brutal and heartless in their treatment of Indianneophytes. When I attended grade school in the late 1950s and early 1960sin northern California, I learned about the kindly Franciscan fathers whodedicated their lives to helping the California Indians (see Thomas 1991for the historical genesis of this perspective). Then, in the late 1960sand 1970s, with the rise of the "Brown Power Movement" in Californiauniversities (Monroy 1990:xiv), a very different story of the Franciscans'participation in California history emerged. With the vitriolicconfrontation that greeted the proposed canonization by the Catholicchurch of Father Serra, the first president of the California missions(see, e.g., Costo and Costo 1987), the general public became aware of howdestructive the Franciscan colonial program was to traditional NativeCalifornia life ways and cultures.

Yet this point had been made in the anthropological literature for morethan a century.



Continues...

Excerpted from Indians, Missionaries, and Merchantsby Kent G. Lightfoot Copyright © 2006 by Kent G. Lightfoot. Excerpted by permission.
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