An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States Ortiz

(^128) An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
noma, traces the colonization of California's Indigenous nations.
The five-hundred-mile road that connected the missions was called
El Camino Real, the Royal Highway.
The Spanish military in California was divided into four districts,
each with Franciscan missions and strategically located presidios.
The 1769 establishment of the first presidia in San Diego coincided
with establishment of the first Franciscan mission in California. The
second presidia was based in Monterey in 1770, to defend the six
missions in the area as well as the mercury mines in the Santa Cruz
Mountains. Monterey became the capital and the only port of entry
for shipments to and from Spanish California, and it remained so
until 1846, when the United States seized California.
These California Franciscan missions and their founder, Junipero
Serra, are extravagantly romanticized by modern California resi­
dents and remain popular tourist sites. Very few visitors notice,
however, that in the middle of the plaza of each mission is a whip­
ping post. The history symbolized by that artifact is not dead and
buried with the generations of Indigenous bodies buried under the
California crust. The scars and trauma have been passed on from
generation to generation. Putting salt in the wound, as it were, Pope
John Paul II in 1988 beatified Junipero Serra, the first step toward
sainthood. California Indigenous peoples were insulted by this act
and organized to prevent the sanctification of a person they consider
to have been an exponent of rape, torture, death, starvation, and
humiliation of their ancestors and the attempted destruction of their
cultures. Serra would take soldiers with him, randomly kidnapping
Indigenous individuals and families, recording these captures in his
diaries, as in this instance: "[When] one fled from between their [the
soldiers'] hands, they caught the other. They tied him, and it was all
necessary, for, even bound, he defended himself that they should not
bring him, and flung himself on the ground with such violence that
he scraped and bruised his thighs and knees. But at last they brought
him .... He was most frightened and very disturbed." 20 In 1878, a
old Kamia man named Janitin told an interviewer of his experience
as a child: "When we arrived at the mission, they locked me in a
room for a week .... Every day they lashed me unjustly because I
did not finish what I did not know how to do, and thus I existed for