Category: pope francis

A 500 year-old fiction

Years ago, when I knew much less of the Indian story in the Pacific Northwest, I had an informal Nez Perce history class here at the Josephy Center. A dozen of us were on the balcony one day when Tamastslikt director Bobbie Conner and her mother came in the door. I shouted down that we were talking about the Stephens Treaties of 1855. Bobbie shouted back that any discussion of Indian treaties had to begin with the Doctrine of Discovery.Read Rich’s Post →

The Pope apologizes

The Canadian boarding school disclosures brought up old stories that had been neglected by governments and church hierarchies for decades. The stories are remembered well by the targets of religious coercion and victims of sexual and physical abuse who are with us still. The Pope came to Canada to apologize to them.

How does an apology compensate for decades—almost 200 years—of forced conversions, physical and sexual abuse, and loss of languages, cultures, and lives that Catholicism brought to Native North America? (And if we consider South America, make that 500 years!)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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From Nasty, Brutish, and Short to the Pope


I’ve not yet seen the Academy Award winning “12 Years a Slave,” but the clips and conversation about slavery and brutality are visceral. Writer John Ridley said in a radio interview that he hoped the film would promote continuing conversations about these difficult subjects. So here are some semi-random thoughts from my end:
By most of the historical markers that we have—journals, histories, memoirs, records chiseled on stone—slavery and brutality have been part of the human condition forever. Wars, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, human sacrifice, human trafficking, purges, and genocide are all over the historical record—and in today’s news bulletins. 
One hardly knows where to start! I just finished reading Brian Fagan’s The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. He begins with the expansion of agriculture in Europe and the travels of the Norse into North America in the warming years—roughly 800-1200 A.D. And finds that even where milder weather made for an expansion of population and agriculture, the folks doing the work—peasants, farmers—lived and worked at the mercy of weather and crop failures every year.
Nobles and the Church fared better—owning and overseeing and accumulating the surpluses from good years. Where warming was not so benign—in most of the world, all suffered: warming brought drought brought California hunter gatherers to their knees, destroyed Mayan cities and their sophisticated irrigation systems, collapsed the complex pre-Inca trade and food systems, and emptied Chaco Canyon. So, even without man-on-man violence, it’s been a hard road for most human inhabitants much of the time. (Life expectancy in Winchester in British Isles in 11thcentury 24 years!)
When Europeans came to the New World, chased, I think, in part by the Little Ice Age that followed the Great Warming, most came as indentured servants. Fathers brought teenage children to the docks and gave them to ships’ captains to take somewhere else, where they could work and eat. First meetings with indigenous people were most often pleasant, dominated by curiosity, need, and even sexual companionship. But disease, theft, wars, and slavery fueled by greed and misunderstanding soon prevailed. Estimates on devastation of indigenous population on European contact in the years following 1492 run as high as 90 percent! We know that present-day New England was depopulated at the Puritans’ arrival. And we have Las Casas’ reports on the populations of Hispaniola and the Indies. He says that the population of that Island went from millions to about 200.
 
“From that time onward the Indians began to seek ways to throw the Christians out of their lands. They took up arms, but their weapons were very weak and of little service in offense and still less in defense. (Because of this, the wars of the Indians against each other are little more than games played by children.) And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” … They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive.”
And where does one go from there? Cambodia? Rwanda? Syria? Slavery might be less prominent today, though reports of trafficking and children impressed into battle are rampant.
So life, as Hobbes told us, is, for most, “nasty, brutish, and short.”
The thread that runs through all of it has to do with power and difference. The difference is established by wealth, health, religion, race, class, tribe, and gender, and the brutality is fueled by hunger, fear, greed, and by seeing “others” as less than human. We can account for today’s brutality by chronicling divisions—increasing divisions of wealth, health, religion, etc. Ironically, the person on the world stage who is speaking this truth is the new Pope, heir to the throne from which Indians’ humanity was debated and yesterday’s horrors were justified.
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