Native Alienation
Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions
Author: Charles A. Sepulveda, Charlotte Coté and Coll Thrush Series: Indigenous ConfluencesIndigenous ConfluencesIndigenous ConfluencesIndigenous ConfluencesIndigenous ConfluencesNative Alienation
Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions
"Despite their explicit goals of colonization and conversion, California missions are just beginning to receive more robust critical scholarly attention that centers Indigenous perspectives on their complex histories and legacies. In this book, Charles Sepulveda foregrounds concerns of gender, sexuality, enslavement, and genocide in reconsidering Spanish mission histories"--
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Summary
Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions
"Despite their explicit goals of colonization and conversion, California missions are just beginning to receive more robust critical scholarly attention that centers Indigenous perspectives on their complex histories and legacies. In this book, Charles Sepulveda foregrounds concerns of gender, sexuality, enslavement, and genocide in reconsidering Spanish mission histories"--
Description
Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions
Sites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region's Indigenous peoples. Mainstream California history, however, still largely presents a romanticized portrait of the creation of the twenty-one Spanish missions between San Diego and Sonoma in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Providing a corrective to this benign historiography, Charles A. Sepulveda reconstructs the violence toward Native people as well the resistance and refusals of his ancestors and other Native people during and after the Spanish genocide.
The conquest enforced the attempted spiritual possession of Native souls and the physical position of Native bodies and the land. At the same time, it strengthened the Spanish view of California's Indigenous people as disposable. Sepulveda demonstrates how enslavement was a key method of conquest, putting to rest the myth of the Spanish as benevolent and beneficial. Centering the experiences of Native peoples, Sepulveda brings to light the gendered dimensions of the conquest and genocide. His fuller history confronts the erasure of Indian individuality and resistance and historicizes the relationship between enslavement, dispossession, and environmental degradation. He also illuminates the mission system's central role in destroying Indigenous people's relationships to the land while examining the practice's centuries-long impact on the lives of Native people.
A groundbreaking reconsideration, Native Alienation transforms our understanding of California Indian history.
Critic Reviews
"Carefully researched, with accounts of specific California Indians, Native Alienation offers a powerful account of both violence and resistance. . . . [Sepulveda's] attention to gendered violence offers an added level of depth to his analysis."
(Ethnic and Racial Studies)"Native Alienation is an important intervention into Spanish mission-era historiography and contributes significantly to the political project of reclaiming California Indian narratives and modes of research for a collective anticolonial voice."
(News from Native California)About the Author
Charles A. Sepulveda (Tongva and Acjachemen) is assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.
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