Category: California Indians

Missing children, missing history

The descriptions of a church-run Canadian boarding school for Indians in Richard Wagamese’s brilliant novel, Indian Horse, were brutal. The book was published in 2012; a movie released in 2017. In today’s news stories, echoing Wagamese’s book, a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children has been found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

Read Rich’s Post →

The Pope, Chiapas, and Father Serra

Pope Francis is on the move again, upsetting the Mexican establishment that would like to show off its fancy malls and building projects by visiting slums and speaking out against violence and corruption. And today, Monday, February 15, he will be in Chiapas, where thousands of Indians from surrounding villages, and even some from Guatemala, will come to hear the Pope deliver a mass, some of it recited in three Mayan dialects.

Pedro Arriaga, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas, told the press that “In Chiapas there is a situation of extreme poverty, of marginalization of the indigenous community, of social conflicts…. Of course we know that one visit by the pope won’t resolve all that…. But we do hope for a profound spiritual experience with the people that will help us transform our social conscience.”

History’s first Latin American pope had already issued a sweeping apology for the Catholic Church’s colonial-era crimes against the continent’s indigenous peoples while in Bolivia last year. And now: “I ask you to show singular tenderness in the way you regard indigenous peoples and their fascinating but not infrequently decimated cultures,” Francis told Mexico’s bishops Saturday in a speech outlining their marching orders. “The indigenous people of Mexico still await true recognition of the richness of their contribution and the fruitfulness of their presence.”

I applaud it all, but have to wonder further about the canonization of Father Serra that the Pope hurried on in his September visit to California. The indigenous people of California too “await true recognition of the… fruitfulness of their presence.” And, according to Alvin Josephy “the treatment of California Indians was as close to genocide as any tribal people had faced, or would face, on the North American continent.”

Although the Pope is apologizing today in Mexico, and apologized profusely for the Church’s treatment of indigenous peoples in Bolivia last year, there has been no such apology to the Indians of California. Instead, there is the march toward canonization for Father Serra, the man who, in the mind of Rupert Costo, a Cahuilla Indian and the editor and publisher, in 1987, of The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide, was responsible for the missions—and the genocide.

Casinos have made some California Indians wealthy, but I have to think that there is not enough tribal strength in that state to stand up to church and government hierarchies. Or to make it through the filters of church, government, and wealth to the Pope, as appears to have been the case in Bolivia and Mexico. I don’t even know that the people and the government of California have ever owned up to the genocide–or “near genocide” to use Alvin’s words–of their indigenous population.

But I do believe that a copy of Costo’s book in the hands of this Pope might be cause for reconsideration. Does anyone have his address?

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Previous post re Father Serra and the Pope is at: http://josephylibrary.blogspot.com/2015/09/rupert-costo-pope-and-my-friend-ray.html

Rupert Costo, the Pope, and my friend Ray

Like many Americans—and people across the world—I have watched and listened to the new Pope with hope and wonder. A man of clerical power that extends over much of the world with Francis’s humility giving voice to the poor, the immigrant, the prisoner, is something new in our time, and something that is reaching beyond Catholics and even Christians. I chuckle when he rides in a Fiat, cheer when he derides consumption, and give thanks when he talks sensibly about climate.

But the canonization of Father Junipero Serra?
My friend Ray Cook grew up in Idaho, lived most of his life in California and worked for the State Highway Department. On retirement, Ray started coming to the Wallowas, where his grandfather had been a Methodist preacher and his grandmother was buried (Ray placed a tombstone for her in the Wallowa cemetery).
Ray once had to evict an elderly Indian lady to make way for a California highway, and the act has haunted him ever since. He came to Fishtrap events for several years, and over time has sent me letters he writes to newspapers and notes of events that he attends—most having to do with American Indians. Many of these things are colored by that experience, some by later stories he has read and heard.
One of the storytellers was a friend he gained at the Highway Department, an engineer named Rupert Costo. Costo was a Cahuilla Indian, a writer, publisher, and advocate for Indians. Ray sent me his autographed copy of a book Costo edited and published, The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide, for the Josephy Library. In it modern scholars write about California Indians and the brutal Mission legacy, and detailed and heart-wrenching Indian testimony that has been taken over the years is reprinted. The book, published in 1987, was an attempt to halt the canonization process of Father Serra.
Costo died in 1989, so he did not live to see Pope Francis’s embrace of Serra. He did live long enough to donate the extensive collection of books and artifacts relating to American Indians that he and his wife, Jeanette, who was Cherokee, had accumulated, to the University of California, Riverside, my alma mater!
And to donate $400,000 to the university to endow a chair in Indian Studies—a position now held by my friend, Clifford Trafzer! In fact, as I reached back for facts in this case, I find out that Costo, who was born in Hemet California, was an instrumental lobbyist for having a UC campus at Riverside. (I don’t remember hearing that story while I was a student there.)
We should, it is argued, not judge Father Serra—or the many priests, Spanish land grantees, and later American miners and farmers who enslaved, tortured, and sometimes sought to eliminate Indians—by the standards of today. So we should condone the throwing of babies into cactus patches to get parents to tell the whereabouts of runaway slaves, threatening and throwing babies off the “Crying Rock” to make Indians work, and collaring Indians to pull plows all as practices of their times?
What about the priests and lay people who did speak up? Alvin Josephy notes, in 500 Nations, a friar who spoke out against the brutal treatment of the Indians in 1799. He was declared insane and taken out of the country. If we canonize the brutalizers, what do we do with those who acted saintly in their times?
Alvin argued that “the treatment of California Indians was as close to genocide as any tribal people had faced, or would face, on the North American continent.” I can’t put my hands on it now, but I believe Alvin knew Costo and his work, and I believe that he, like Costo, would now stand up against this new Pope on the canonization of Serra.
We admire Pope Francis exactly because he argues against many of the popular and expressed values of our times—unbridled capitalism and conspicuous consumption for example. If Costo’s book and Josephy’s work had found their ways into the Pope’s life, I have to believe that there would be a different story in the news today. Maybe we would learn the friar’s name, and maybe HE would be sainted and Serra relegated to the history books as a man of his times.

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