Burn the Mission Down

By Corine Fairbanks, American Indian Movement Southern California

Many people outside of California are not aware that in the fourth grade, the curriculum includes studying the California Mission System.  Little 4th graders run to the nearest Arts & Crafts store (Michael’s sells them in particular), to buy a styrofoam mission kit, that the student puts together and presents to the class.  The project is designed to teach about California history, quickly and inaccurately, educate about California Native Nations, and the relationship they had with the missions.  However, according to Alvin M. Josephy in his book 500 Nations, the history of the California tribes “was as close to genocide as any tribal people had faced, or would face, on the North American continent”.

In public schools, history books might skim over the fact that “Indians” were forced into labor. Rarely do they go into further detail as to how the Missions rivaled even the most horrific of concentration camps of fascist Germany. Professor of American Studies, David Stannard, states in his book American Holocaust  that Franciscan missions in California were known to be like “furnaces of death”.  Had the Padres been able to build a gas chamber, who is to say if they wouldn’t have gassed Natives that refused to meet building quotas, and those who revolted against the Padres, the Spanish military and the Colonizers?

A Franciscan missionary named Father Junipero Serra led a Spanish army up from Mexico and reached present-day San Diego to build the first mission in 1769.  It was Serra who built the first of 21 missions that eventually stretched from the southern tip of the Baja California to Sonoma, just north of San Francisco.  Missions, often built near presidios (military outposts), helped the surrounding pueblos to steal and develop pristine land.  Slave labor would then in turn exploit and export natural resources.

Spanish soldiers kidnapped Indians by the thousands. They were given Spanish names, dressed in blue uniforms, forced into slavery to build the missions and to work in the surrounding farms or pueblos, in which the church was generously compensated. They also were forced to care for livestock, tanned hides, and produced candles, bricks, tiles, shoes, saddles, soap and other necessities.

Many Native families have kept record of what life was like living in the missions by way oral history.  The missions imprisoned Natives in cramped quarters, with poor ventilation and bad sanitation, which encouraged the spread of disease.  Native Peoples were fed “gruel” and not allowed to hunt fish or gather their traditional foods.  The People were not allowed to speak their own language, sing, pray or practice ceremonies, nor were they able to keep their families intact. Children were separated from parents and housed in different quarters.  It was common for women and children to be raped and kept as sex slaves.  In her 2010 essay, “Rape is the Weapon, Story is the Cure,”   Professor Deborah Miranda (Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation), argues “that California Indian women still have not healed from the tragedy of Missionization, colonization, and the violence it inflicted on our bodies”.

“Escapees” were hunted down tortured (often branded like livestock), mutilated and killed to deter others from attempting the same.

“I think everyone, historians and Indians alike, agree that Missionization was a disaster for the Indians:  our estimated population numbers went from about one million to 15,000 in just under 200 years.  We lost almost all of our land, all of our natural resources (that provided food and shelter), many of us lost our language, religion, and communities.  Can you imagine if 8 out of every 10 people you know died from being taken over by another group of people who showed up in your town?  Diseases from Euro-Americans did so much damage that we almost didn’t survive.



The hardest part was losing our homelands.  The Missions made us move into the Missions, and sixty-five years later when the missions closed down, all of our land was taken by other non-Indian people, so we had nowhere to go, no way to feed ourselves.  Mexicans used Indians as free labor – for a meal and a place to sleep, Indians worked almost like slaves for the Mexican Ranchos.

The average baby born in a California mission only lived to be 7 or 8 years old; some disease or other would kill them.  Also, because of a Euro-American disease called syphilis, many Indian men and women could no longer have babies, so there were no new kids to replace the people who died.  Every time an old person died, it was like an entire library of knowledge, history and stories burned down.” —Dr. Deborah Miranda, Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation.

Beginning in 1775, many of the mission Indians began to revolt. Some 800 Ipai and Tipai Indians burned down the San Diego mission that year. The revolt was brutally put down by the Spanish soldiers, as were all of the revolts.  The revolt of San Gabriel Mission in 1785, was co-lead by a woman named Toypurina.  She was known to be a medicine woman and respected leader.  When she was caught, at her trial she was recorded as having said, “I hate the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil, for trespassing upon the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains.”  Rebellions and uprisings were not unusual.  Another famous rebellion occurred at the Missions of Santa Inés, Mission Santa Barbara, and Mission La Purisima, known as the Chumash Revolt of 1824 .

Some people have argued that schools have lacked accurate educational materials and tools to teach about this period of time.  We argue that it is intentional. The way the curriculum is constructed in schools, it is part of a larger picture to invalidate and erase Indigenous existence. Rarely are Native people asked to participate and recount their history, unless it will evoke warm and fuzzy feelings, and reinforce the lies that the United States and Indian wars were one huge misunderstanding, a sorta, “you say, potato, I say patatoe,” kinda thing.  Where the Colonizers have been able to rewrite history, Hollywood fills in the blanks with technicolor stereotypes and myths.

“…non-Indian people had to convince us we were something other than what we were.  To kill our ancestors and take our lands, they had to define us a something less than human.  To colonize or exterminate a people you must first define them as a weed.  You must transform them from a person to a pestilence.  Once objectified, they can be killed without thought or remorse.  But this process is even more insidious…

Non Indian invaders created a caricature of the Indian.  They described us so often and so consistently over generations that we began to believe the lies ourselves and act in harmony with this view.  A lie told a thousand times often becomes the truth to those who tell it, to those who hear it, and to even those that the lie is about.” —Don Coyhis, Mohican Nation

Elementary Schools and the insistence to keep the Mission project in the curriculum nurture lies that the colonizers were benevolent father figures that came here by divine direction and divine right.  It primes school age children to keep swallowing lies that have roots with the Papal Bulls of the 15th century, which gave Christian explorers the right to claim any land that was not inhabited by Christians, to be “discovered”, claimed, and exploited.   The wounds of “historical trauma” are kept open and festering by not teaching about the REAL histories of these missions, and the atrocities that took place here on the west coast.

“Most importantly, it is about making connections between what happened THEN with the current conditions of California Indians (economic, educational, psychological, legal).  How many of the history books have you read actually do that?  or prepare students to think about these connections in their future?  How many texts used in the classroom contain the voices of California Indians?  How many texts teach children that Missionization was not good for Indians in any way, shape or form – not now, not then, not ever – and yet, the ideology behind Missionization continues to harm contemporary California Indians and the non-Indian children who grow up to be adults with no clue about that?

Southern California is covered in faux-Mission style buildings, red tile rooftops, tourist destinations that celebrate the Missions as cultural and civilizing successes.  The culture itself is deeply damaged by myths that celebrate Spanish/Mexican rule and thereby denigrate Native Californian lives and culture.  There is very little information available to the general public that even begins to question that mythology, let alone refute it.  This affects the efforts of Native Californians alive today in a multitude of damaging and negative ways.”  —Dr. Deborah Miranda, Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation

So if your fourth grader is instructed to build one of these styrofoam monstrosities, AIM Southern California offers a few suggestions to replace the current requirement:

1) Negotiate with teacher to have your child interview a California Native Tribal member- documenting oral history, past and present….(often these school lessons foster the myth that California Native people no longer exist. California Native people are hardly ever discussed in present tense, or if they are, the word “Casino” is often in the same sentence, and no, not all California Native Nations have casinos).

2) If Teacher is not willing to substitute lesson plan for above suggestion, and the student ABSOLUTELY has to build a styrofoam California “concentration camp,” then construct one that exhibits slave labor practices, horrible living conditions, and tortured women and children. Use fake blood to sprinkle about to represent the massive bloodshed that Padres and Spanish military perpetuated together and finally, be sure to include the mass graves sites that dead Natives were carelessly chucked into by the Padres.

3) After completing the mission project, invite family and friends over, and under adult supervision, (with plenty of water on hand) take a match and torch it! Celebrate the completion of this horrific assignment that has probably triggered “post traumatic stress disorder” like symptoms for your entire family. Please take pictures of your burning down the mission or better yet, YouTube it, so that we can all enjoy the spectacle!

Misssions and the California Mission system should not be regarded as a symbol of a golden era in California’s history. Missions should be regarded for what they were, as death camps- where people were enslaved, tortured and murdered.

-Corine Fairbanks
American Indian Movement
Southern California

(copywrite c.fairbanks 2014)

For America To Live Europe Must Die

By Russell Means
From The Anarchist Library

The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering, in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is said to be Russell Means’ most famous speech.

The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

So what you read here is not what I have written. It is what I have said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don’t really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I’m more concerned with the American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it’s a marginal sort of concern. It’s very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that’s a person’s individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples’ today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but may be confused as to how to proceed.

(You notice I use the term American Indian rather than Native American or Native indigenous people or Amerindian when referring to my people.) There has been some controversy about such terms, and frankly, at this point, I find it absurd. Primarily it seems that American Indian is being rejected as European in origin — which is true. But all the above terms are European in origin; the only non-European way is to speak of Lakota — or, more precisely, of Oglala, Brule, et. — and of the Dineh, the Miccousukee, and all the rest of the several hundred correct tribal names.

(There is also some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country, India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met “Indio,” from the Italian in dio, meaning “in God.”)

It takes a strong effort on the part of each American Indian not to become Europeanized. The strength for this effort can only come from the traditional ways, the traditional values that our elders retain. It must come from the hoop, the four directions, the relations: it cannot come from the pages of a book or a thousand books. No European can ever teach a Lakota to be Lakota, a Hopi to be Hopi. A master’s degree in “Indian Studies” or in “education” or in anything else cannot make a person into a human being or provide knowledge into the traditional ways. It can only make you into a mental European, an outsider.

I should be clear about something here, because there seems to be some confusion about it. When I speak of Europeans or mental Europeans, I’m not allowing for false distinctions. I’m not saying that on the one hand there are the by-products of a few thousand years of genocidal, reactionary European intellectual development which is bad; and on the other hand there is some new revolutionary intellectual development which is good. I’m referring here to the so-called theories of Marxism and anarchism and “leftism” in general. I don’t believe these theories can be separated from the rest of the European intellectual tradition. It’s really just the same old song.

The process began much earlier. Newton, for example, “revolutionized” physics and the so-called natural science by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation.

Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these “thinkers” took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction. They picked up where Christianity ended: they “secularized” Christian religion, as the “scholars” like to say — and in doing so they made Europe more able and ready to act as an expansionist culture. Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!.

This is what has come to be termed “efficiency” in the European mind. Whatever is mechanical is perfect; whatever seems to work at the moment — that is, proves the mechanical model to be the right one — is considered correct, even when it is clearly untrue. This is why “truth” changes so fast in the European mind; the answers which result from such a process are only stopgaps, only temporary, and must be continuously discarded in favor of new stopgaps which support the mechanical models and keep them (the models) alive.

Hegel and Marx were heirs to the thinking of Newton, Descartes, Locke and Smith. Hegel finished the process of secularizing theology — and that is put in his own terms — he secularized the religious thinking through which Europe understood the universe. Then Marx put Hegel’s philosophy in terms of “materialism,” which is to say that Marx despiritualized Hegel’s work altogether. Again, this is in Marx’ own terms. And this is now seen as the future revolutionary potential of Europe. Europeans may see this as revolutionary, But American Indians see it simply as still more of that same old European conflict between being and gaining. The intellectual roots of a new Marxist form of European imperialism lie in Marx’ — and his followers’ — links to the tradition of Newton, Hegel, and the others.

Being is a spiritual proposition. Gaining is a material act. Traditionally, American Indians have always attempted to be the best people they could. Part of that spiritual process was and is to give away wealth, to discard wealth in order not to gain. Material gain is an indicator of false status among traditional people, while it is “proof that the system works” to Europeans. Clearly, there are two completely opposing views at issue here, and Marxism is very far over to the other side from the American Indian view. But lets look at a major implication of this; it is not merely an intellectual debate.

The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person. And who seems most expert at dehumanizing other people? And why? Soldiers who have seen a lot of combat learn to do this to the enemy before going back into combat. Murderers do it before going out to commit murder. Nazi SS guards did it to concentration camp inmates. Cops do it. Corporation leaders do it to the workers they send into uranium mines and steel mills. Politicians do it to everyone in sight. And what the process has in common for each group doing the dehumanizing is that it makes it all right to kill and otherwise destroy other people. One of the Christian commandments says, “Thou shalt not kill,” at least not humans, so the trick is to mentally convert the victims into nonhumans. Then you can proclaim violation of your own commandment as a virtue.