AND YET, THEY PERSISTED

SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY HERITAGE LAB ARTIST ERIC S. CARLSON / COLORIZED BY CAROLYN ARCABASCIO An artist’s depiction of Mission Santa Clara de Asís, circa 1800. A portion of the Native American neighborhood is in the foreground, showing both native-style dwellings (right) and adobe dormitories (left). The dormitory cut-away shows its interior and construction techniques. The mission had a Native population of 1,318 individuals at that time.

It’s often thought that Native Americans either died off or were stripped of their culture during the colonization of northern California. But recent investigations are revealing that the Natives maintained their traditions.

At Mak-‘amham restaurant in Berkeley, California, you can sample “old school acorn bread” or more contemporary “acorn-flour brownies with walnuts + bay salt,” on a menu created from traditional Native Ohlone ingredients. In San Bernadino, elementary school students read a series of historical novels approved by Chumash tribal elders, tracing California history from a Native viewpoint, rather than constructing models of colonial Spanish missions like past generations. And Julia Parker, a Native Coast MiwokKashaya Pomo basket-weaver—whose works are owned by the Smithsonian Institution and Queen Elizabeth II—passes on her skills to four generations of her family.

All of these activities may come as a surprise to many who assume Native Californians and their traditional lifeways didn’t survive the Spanish Mission era (1769 – 1834). When California’s twenty-one missions were secularized in 1833, the popular belief was that Native Californians had all died, assimilated into other cultures, or intermarried, losing any traces of their traditions and practices. But in fact “Native people found ways to weather that period and survive,” according to Tsim Schneider, an enrolled citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo) and an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“For so long, all of the scholarship focused on the missions as a colonial space,” said Rebecca Allen, a mission researcher and president of the Society for California Archaeology. “Even when Native American peoples are talked about, it’s their role in that colonial space. The more archaeology and research, and the more Native Americans get involved in this dialog, we realize we need to reframe this and start to recognize the missions as Native space.”

Schneider agreed. “What gets lost in the story of missionera California,” he explained, “is that missions are established in complicated, dynamic, and long-standing indigenous landscapes that have their own political, economic, and social histories—and the padres really didn’t have a concept of what they were engaging with.”

In fact, all the missions but one were built on Native village sites. Allen said the padres “recognized that Native Americans built their villages in the best places: near rivers, at higher elevations, with access to food.” Of course, that also put the missionaries close to prospective converts, known as “neophytes.”

The Natives were already suffering from contact diseases. As the Spanish missionaries moved up into Alta (upper) California, they brought new animals, new invasive plant species, new power dynamics, and new goods. Allen said the Native peoples saw their world shifting. From that perspective, contact with the missions itself could be viewed as a strategy of persistence. “If you see someone coming in who seems to have a lot of access to goods, wouldn’t you at least send some family members there?” she asked. “It becomes a matter of ‘What are our options here?’” Some Natives chose to join the missions, while others did not.

Once Natives moved to the missions, they maintained their traditional ways. The historical record shows that many continued to occupy traditional Native housing, rather than the structures built under direction of the padres. “If you had

These burned shell beads were recovered from a pit feature at Mission Santa Clara. Archaeologist Lee Panich posits that materials like these are evidence that Native people continued aspects of their traditional mourning ceremonies, including the destruction of the deceased’s personal possessions, while in residence in the mission.

Like other California missions where Natives faced severe hardships, Mission San Carlos Borromeo (also known as Carmel Mission), is now a popular tourist attraction.

2,000 Native Americans at a mission, only about ten percent would have been living in mission housing,” said Allen.

For several reasons, though, evidence of traditional housing was never found in archaeological digs. The ephemeral nature of structural plant materials like tule and saplings, the lack of examining the missions’ outer perimeters, and a focus on exploring the colonial footprint all hindered obtaining the full archaeological picture of the true mission landscape for many decades.

Recently, Allen made several important discoveries. “We work with large mechanical equipment, like a backhoe fitted with a flat blade, and we slowly peel back layers of soil over large areas,” she said. “In Native American living areas, you don’t find stone floors.” Instead, archaeologists search for stained, or darker, “soil affected by people living there.” Allen used this technique at Missions San Luis Obispo, San Jose, and Santa Clara.

The Santa Clara site revealed the first archaeological evidence of a traditional Native house on mission property. “First we could see part of a round stain,” she said. “Pretty soon we have a half-circle, then we pull back more and we have a full circle. And pretty soon we have the whole outline. Then we can go in for detailed excavation.” The house’s footprint was a shallow basin with sloping walls and a flat floor, measuring nearly ten feet in diameter. In the center was an intact hearth filled with ash. Analysis of samples from the floor revealed native foods including black walnuts and elderberries, as well as wheat, corn, and evidence of tobacco use.

What’s more, the entire house had been burned. “If someone died, or if someone moved, they would burn the house. What better way to keep pests and disease down?” she asked. Allen contrasted this with the padres’ practice of “stuffing” all unmarried women into a single adobe dormitory. Disease took a heavy toll in these tight quarters; by the end of the Mission period, the ratio of men to women at many missions was two to one. “Living in what was considered ‘civilized’ housing was killing them,” she noted.

Allen’s team also discovered pits near the house that were filled with animal bones, ceramics, chipped-stone artifacts, and a large quantity of shell beads. She initially interpreted the pits as caches to store, or hide, trade items, but some of the pits showed evidence of burning. Archaeologist Lee Panich of Santa Clara University had a suggestion. In addition to burning a deceased person’s lodging, the deceased’s possessions were typically burned, too, as part of mourning ceremonies. Panich posited that some of these pits of burned objects were the continuation of a Native mourning practice, right in the midst of the Catholic mission. “That was a fun moment,” Allen said, “of someone else coming in with a new perspective.”

Franciscan missionaries founded twenty-one missions in Alta California to convert Natives to Catholicism and to help solidify Imperial Spain’s claim to the region. The mission padres claimed vast tracts of land, using Native labor to raise cattle, sheep, and domesticated crops, including wheat and corn, fruit and olive trees, and grapes for producing wine and brandy. They were also required to provide food and supplies for Spanish army outposts. It was a horrific time for Indigenous peoples, who nonetheless persisted. The following timeline notes some of the significant events that occurred from the colonial period to the present.

1769 - The first Alta California Spanish mission is founded at San Diego. Estimates place the Native Californian population from 133,000 to more than 705,000. 1806 - A measles epidemic kills an estimated twenty-five percent of the mission population in the San Francisco Bay area within just three months. 1810 - The Mexican War of Independence begins. 1821 - Mexico (including Alta California) gains independence from Spain. 1824 - The largest number of Natives in the history of the mission system—21,066—are attached to missions this year. 1832 - By the end of this year, mission padres performed a total of 87,787 baptisms and 24,529 marriages, and they recorded 63,789 deaths over the course of the missions’ existence in Alta California. The missions collectively own 151,180 head of cattle, 137,969 sheep, and 14,522 horses. 1833 - Mexico passes a law secularizing the missions. The law stipulates that Native mission neophytes are to receive up to half of the mission land; this was never put into effect. 1834-1836 - The missions are secularized; their lands are divided and given out in grants by the Mexican government. 1837-1838 - A smallpox epidemic devastates the Native population north of San Francisco, killing an estimated 70,000. 1846-1873 - More than 370 massacres of Natives by non-Natives take place in California. Coupled with individual killings of Natives, it’s believed that more than 100,000 were killed during this time period. 1850 - California becomes part of the United States. The California legislature passes a law removing Native Americans from their lands and allowing them to be sold into indentured servitude for minor offences, such as loitering. 1851 - California Governor Peter Burnett said he expects “a war of extermination” to be waged “until the Indian race becomes extinct.” The state authorizes $1.29 million to subsidize militia campaigns against Natives. 1910 - Estimates place the Native Californian population at 25,000, its lowest figure since European contact. 2010 - In the U.S. census, 723,225 Californians self-identify as American Indian or Alaska Native.

2019 - California Governor Gavin Newsom issues an executive order apologizing on behalf of the state’s citizens for a history of “violence, maltreatment and neglect” against Native Americans. There are currently 109 federally recognized Native American tribes in California. —GAYLE KECK

Panich, author of the upcoming book Narratives of Persistence, is well aware of the difficult situation Native peoples had to navigate. “It would have been apparent early-on that the missions were dangerous,” he said, “but also apparent that the Spanish were here to stay. So I think a reasonable interpretation was that certain groups thought it was in their best interests to align themselves with the missions—but the archaeology shows that they didn’t buy into it fully.”

The padres kept meticulous records, including noting whether individuals received last rites before their deaths. Studies of mission records show that “Natives, by and large, weren’t accepting last rites, or even annual communion,” Panich said. (However, other researchers believe the missionaries may have thought neophytes weren’t pious enough for those rites.) In reports back to Spain, the padres mentioned “how difficult it was to root out Native belief systems,” Panich added.

Given the modern-day belief that Natives weren’t allowed to leave the missions, Panich said experts were surprised by the padres’ accounts of neophytes who died outside of the missions. “If you got some sort of sickness,” he explained, “you probably knew which ones were fatal—so people likely just took off and went back home to die.” This theory is supported by archaeological evidence. “There are instances of burials that have been found on the outskirts of the mission area, in precontact-looking sites, of individuals who are buried with thousands of glass beads,” he said. “That could be some of those people coming out of the missions to die in their home villages.” Even at some burials in mission cemeteries, padres noted that Natives followed their tradition of throwing beads into the graves.

During a 2007 construction mitigation project at Mission San Jose, excavators uncovered a structure approximately thirty-three-feet wide, which was too large for a domestic building. They recovered various objects such as shell beads, abalone pendants, local earthenware, groundstone, chert, and obsidian; there was also a metal cross. Panich believes the structure was a sweat lodge (temescal), used by Natives for gatherings and religious practices.

Students from Santa Clara University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, excavate at Toms Point. This area was home to a long-standing Coast Miwok community where Native people returned after the missions were secularized.

There’s even support in the mission’s papers for this theory. Its death record states, “On the 15th of the current month [December, 1818]...the neophytes Azarias and Francisco died under very dangerous circumstances...They were in the temescal (I wish we had never permitted its construction) watching the dance, which is always dangerous.” The cause of death is also described: “They ate a root that everyone knows to be very poisonous.” Panich believes the root was likely jimsonweed, a hallucinogenic. Considering how outnumbered the padres were—a handful of Spaniards to more than a thousand neophytes—“they probably needed to let people do their thing just to keep everybody happy,” he concluded.

Other Native religious objects found in adobe dormitories at both San Jose and Santa Clara missions include charmstones, which were sometimes used by traditional healers to “trap” sickness. The stones are so sacred that some tribes won’t allow publication of their photos.

There’s also evidence that, contrary to the common belief, native people who lived at the missions were not shut off from the outside world and their homelands. Native people frequently ran away from missions, and there were also times when the padres allowed them to leave for a few days or weeks to hunt, gather, and conduct other rites of passage. “They were traveling purposefully, staying in touch with their homelands,” Schneider said.

Items, such as obsidian tools and shell beads have been found in Native dormitories. “Obsidian is an obvious connection we can link to specific places. In the last ten years, we’ve analyzed roughly two thousand obsidian artifacts from Missions San Jose and Santa Clara,” Panich noted. “Ninety percent of that came from St. Helena and Santa Rosa [about 100 miles to the north]; ten percent came from the Sierras [as much as 200 miles to the east]. They must have been coming in as trade from people running away from missions, or on passes. That contradicts the previous belief that, when the last neophyte was baptized, the villages had all been abandoned.”

There are also darker tales of Native persistence in the historical record. Lorenzo Asisara, who was born at Mission Santa Cruz in 1819, talked about mission life from a Native perspective. “The Spanish priests were very cruel with the Indians,” he told a researcher in 1877. “They mistreated them a lot, they kept them poorly fed and ill-clothed, and they made them work like slaves. The priests did not practice what they preached at the pulpit.”

According to Asisara, his father was one of twenty

Natives who conspired to murder Padre Andres Quintana, an infamous priest who flogged men, women, and even children at the Santa Cruz mission, using a whip tipped with a cruel wire point. The murder took place in 1812, a time of turmoil in Alta California. The Mexican independence movement began in 1810, ending Spanish supply ships and crown support for the missions. “The padres needed to rely even more on Native labor,” Panich explained. “That’s when you really see things decay in terms of the relationships.” When neophytes fled the missions in these later years, the padres would send out punitive expeditions. “Sometimes they’d bring back the fugitives,” he said, “and also capture women and children.” These captives were used as leverage “to get holdouts to come into the mission,” Panich added.

When the missions were secularized by the Mexican government in 1833, Natives faced a new reality—and they adapted once again. “Some Native people remained living in the communities they had created at the missions,” Schneider stated. “In other cases, they were forced into work at a nearby rancho, where they often applied some of the skills they learned at the missions, such as blacksmithing or carpentry.”

For Natives who hadn’t been in the missions, life became even more difficult, particularly as the Gold Rush changed California’s dynamic once again and it became a U.S. state. “That’s when you had out and out genocide, especially north of San Francisco Bay,” said Panich. State-funded militias carried out hundreds of massacres. “Groups that had been in the missions escaped some of this,” he continued, “because, often, they made the choice to turn their identities inward. Going underground was a survival strategy, but it also cost them their authenticity in the eyes of later observers.”

Still other Native families returned to their homelands, where they blended mission-learned work skills with traditional seasonal mobility patterns. “Sometimes those who were pressed into laboring at local ranches, mills, and farms were quite skilled in combining their seasonal employment with collecting trips for food and other resources, and as one way to keep track of dispersed family members,” Schneider said. At Toms Point, a cape about sixty miles northwest of San Francisco, Schneider and Panich conducted research on private property that was once home to a trading post that was founded sometime during the 1840s by George Wood. He married a Native woman and his workforce was Native American.

The remnants of a Native-style dwelling were revealed during an investigation at Mission Santa Clara in the mid-2000s. At the time, this was the first such dwelling to be documented archaeologically at a California mission site. Another was recently uncovered at Mission San Gabriel in Los Angeles.

Consulting historical maps that pinpointed the trading post--and even noted Native housing--the archaeologists used ground-penetrating radar to search the area. “Even though the footprint of the trading post wasn’t there, we were left with all the remnants of the people who worked, ate, danced, and held feasts at this place,” Schneider said. “By working at Toms Point, we were able to recontextualize this colonial place that is symbolic of an era of violence and widespread Native American cultural loss into a much longer history and record of indigenous presence reaching back at least 13,000 years.”

Soil samples turned up charred seeds that may be evidence of typical Native American land-management via burning. “The faunal assemblage showed persistence in terms of foodways,” Schneider noted, with a variety of waterfowl, fish, and shellfish remains. In addition to obsidian and chert flakes, the team discovered scraping tools shaped from bottle glass, using traditional techniques. “The bottle glass tools and debitage are especially poignant examples of indigenous persistence, or Native people creatively applying their knowledge and skills of flintknapping to imported materials,” Schneider said.

Why is the archaeological story of persistence so

A flaked bottle glass artifact from the Toms Point trading post site. Investigations at one nearby site recovered a complete arrow point manufactured from similar bottle glass.

important? “It was a question that was bugging me, the history of my peoples’ encounters with colonial institutions,” Schneider explained. “We know we’re still here and we have a long and resilient history, but the archaeology was lacking and I wanted to do the work that might help fill in the gaps of the story between the mission period and the modern era that my tribe is a part of.”

“Change and continuity are part of the narrative all along,” he continued. “Native people created ways to remain connected to their loved ones, to their cherished resources for baskets, food, and tools, and to the landscapes that are meaningful to them. They persisted to remain relevant and to maintain a sense of belonging in a landscape that was rapidly being taken away from them. I think that’s a story I can speak to as a tribal member. Forward-thinking is at the heart of persistence,” Schneider concluded. “There is always a vision of the future that Native Americans want for their families.”

GAYLE KECK is a frequent contributor to American Archaeology. Her article “Discovering The Archaeology Of Tattooing,” which appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of American Archaeology, won the Society for American Archaeology’s 2019 Gene Stuart Award.