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Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions
This book is a compelling and balanced history of the California missions and their impact on the Indians they tried to convert. Focusing primarily on the religious conflict between the two groups, it sheds new light on the tensions, accomplishments, and limitations of the California mission experience. James A. Sandos, an eminent authority on the American West, traces the history of the Franciscan missions from the creation of the initial one in 1769 until they were turned over to the public in 1836. Addressing such topics as the singular theology of the missions, the role of music in bonding Indians to Franciscan enterprises, the diseases caused by contact with the missions, and the Indian resistance to missionary activity, Sandos not only describes what happened in the California missions but offers a persuasive explanation for why it happened.
- GenresHistory
304 pages, Hardcover
First published April 10, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 11, 2020
Sandos, driving with no theoretical or methodological map, makes a series of wrong turns as soon as he hits the road. His is a history that is neutral, balanced, and “detached.” I don’t know what the critical methodological milieu was like in history departments circa 2004, but I can’t imagine even the most straight-laced, anti-theory historian claiming to offer “detached” analysis today. What he means by that is, primarily, work free from pro- or anti-Christian bias, both of which have colored much scholarship regarding California’s Franciscan mission system. Fair enough—that’s no consciously malignant aim. Academic tools have been levied for and against religion and religious legacies, forming the antagonistic dual inheritance of the academic study of religion. You won’t see scholars in the field openly claim either bias, even if their identity might predispose them to one bias or the other.
As is widely agreed upon in religious studies and many history departments today, purely “detached” scholarship does not exist. It’s not possible. Prominent religious studies theorists, historians, anthropologists, and philosophers even argue that it wouldn’t be desirable if it were possible, which is a rabbit hole I won’t go down. But as soon as you advance beyond rote description, you import a perspective, and therefore become entangled in a normative game. Moreover, whatever you choose to explain—where do you direct your attention? What do you think needs explanation?—indicates some level of normativity.
This isn’t just a theoretical quibble, though. The epistemological assumption of detachment—figured as the ability to act as transparent reader of the archive (a metonym for history in toto) and the rational, reliable historical narrator—has consequences on one’s interpretation of historical sources. One such consequence is a failure to recognize the need to reflect on what one means by “religion,” to take an example that is constantly at play in this book. Sandos suffers no such reflection and proceeds to align religion with all that is anti-modern, even using the word “medieval” too liberally (it is historically accurate to place the Franciscan’s devotional and theological influences in the medieval period). Piety, not just asceticism or self-flagellation, is suspect as a modern concept, i.e., it is medieval. Medieval straggler Junípero Serra finds himself diametrically opposed to modernity and as the “antithesis” and “enemy” of “the Enlightenment.” The mission system itself, despite being a product of empire and the morning yawn of modernity as much as something more obviously modern like the typewriter or the Baconian scientific method, seems to Sandos a momentary “backward” (actual word he uses) blip in a broader, and more true, advance of the mighty modern state. The state, of course, is more fundamentally in tune with “the Age of Enlightenment.”
This is all untenable and wouldn’t pass muster in a graduate course on early modernity today. First of all, there was no monolithic “Enlightenment.” Sentient humans weren’t just spontaneously waking up to reason (not quite Sandos’ characterization, but this is the typical assumption in the usual thumbnail version) and putting religion aside. Moreover, probably the majority of Enlightenment thinkers were in some way connected to Christianity, albeit in varied ways and often in significantly different ways than Reformation(s) era theologians and philosophers. But to actually write that the Enlightenment and religion are diametrically opposed is just wrong. Sandos repeatedly uses this framework as one guide in interpreting the Spanish Franciscans. Meanwhile, the things he identifies as “religion” flow from this understanding of religion as more “medieval” than modern—he recapitulates the missionaries’ understanding of what is religion and what is not at various junctures. There are various consequences.
The kind of social and religious control present in the mission system, creasing along lines of gender and race, is also at least partially a product of Enlightenment era thinking. It is during the waves of “Enlightenment” that Europeans discovered their supposed innate superiority. Certainly Europeans judged Indigenous people as inferior right off the bat, but Enlightenment era thinking about the nature of “man” and the progress of civilization leant itself to justifications of slave and near slave labor arrangements. For all the care Franciscans may have poured into their treatment of the Native Americans in their missions, which is debatable, the operation of missions as a place to put people to work (as well as to convert) has nothing inherently “medieval” about it. Sandos just assumes that because he finds it “backward,” then it must be rooted in the “medieval” and not in Enlightenment progress.
Recent historiography and theory movements then diminish—rightly so—the strength of this book.
While frustrating to read, Sandos at least writes with force and (too much) confidence—he’s not boring or long-winded. His insight that baptism in California did not at all mean conversion and full adoption of Christianity is a really solid insight, and one that seems to have been needed. This does break from the missionaries’ expectation, to give Sandos credit, and causes them to react more severely to perceived willful Native American deviance than they might otherwise have. He also works towards a historical perspective that does not oversell the strength of the mission system. He is fairly savvy there. The Spanish had a fragile operation going on in North America. It is more accurate to say they were permitted to remain in many Indigenous homelands than to say the Spanish conquered the entire swath of land that we usually see history books call “New Spain.” Sandos shows this by highlighting Indigenous resistance to Spanish control. I still felt like he presumed the Spanish the more powerful culture in encounters with Native Americans, but he cracks the illusion of titanic conquest too.
As is widely agreed upon in religious studies and many history departments today, purely “detached” scholarship does not exist. It’s not possible. Prominent religious studies theorists, historians, anthropologists, and philosophers even argue that it wouldn’t be desirable if it were possible, which is a rabbit hole I won’t go down. But as soon as you advance beyond rote description, you import a perspective, and therefore become entangled in a normative game. Moreover, whatever you choose to explain—where do you direct your attention? What do you think needs explanation?—indicates some level of normativity.
This isn’t just a theoretical quibble, though. The epistemological assumption of detachment—figured as the ability to act as transparent reader of the archive (a metonym for history in toto) and the rational, reliable historical narrator—has consequences on one’s interpretation of historical sources. One such consequence is a failure to recognize the need to reflect on what one means by “religion,” to take an example that is constantly at play in this book. Sandos suffers no such reflection and proceeds to align religion with all that is anti-modern, even using the word “medieval” too liberally (it is historically accurate to place the Franciscan’s devotional and theological influences in the medieval period). Piety, not just asceticism or self-flagellation, is suspect as a modern concept, i.e., it is medieval. Medieval straggler Junípero Serra finds himself diametrically opposed to modernity and as the “antithesis” and “enemy” of “the Enlightenment.” The mission system itself, despite being a product of empire and the morning yawn of modernity as much as something more obviously modern like the typewriter or the Baconian scientific method, seems to Sandos a momentary “backward” (actual word he uses) blip in a broader, and more true, advance of the mighty modern state. The state, of course, is more fundamentally in tune with “the Age of Enlightenment.”
This is all untenable and wouldn’t pass muster in a graduate course on early modernity today. First of all, there was no monolithic “Enlightenment.” Sentient humans weren’t just spontaneously waking up to reason (not quite Sandos’ characterization, but this is the typical assumption in the usual thumbnail version) and putting religion aside. Moreover, probably the majority of Enlightenment thinkers were in some way connected to Christianity, albeit in varied ways and often in significantly different ways than Reformation(s) era theologians and philosophers. But to actually write that the Enlightenment and religion are diametrically opposed is just wrong. Sandos repeatedly uses this framework as one guide in interpreting the Spanish Franciscans. Meanwhile, the things he identifies as “religion” flow from this understanding of religion as more “medieval” than modern—he recapitulates the missionaries’ understanding of what is religion and what is not at various junctures. There are various consequences.
The kind of social and religious control present in the mission system, creasing along lines of gender and race, is also at least partially a product of Enlightenment era thinking. It is during the waves of “Enlightenment” that Europeans discovered their supposed innate superiority. Certainly Europeans judged Indigenous people as inferior right off the bat, but Enlightenment era thinking about the nature of “man” and the progress of civilization leant itself to justifications of slave and near slave labor arrangements. For all the care Franciscans may have poured into their treatment of the Native Americans in their missions, which is debatable, the operation of missions as a place to put people to work (as well as to convert) has nothing inherently “medieval” about it. Sandos just assumes that because he finds it “backward,” then it must be rooted in the “medieval” and not in Enlightenment progress.
Recent historiography and theory movements then diminish—rightly so—the strength of this book.
While frustrating to read, Sandos at least writes with force and (too much) confidence—he’s not boring or long-winded. His insight that baptism in California did not at all mean conversion and full adoption of Christianity is a really solid insight, and one that seems to have been needed. This does break from the missionaries’ expectation, to give Sandos credit, and causes them to react more severely to perceived willful Native American deviance than they might otherwise have. He also works towards a historical perspective that does not oversell the strength of the mission system. He is fairly savvy there. The Spanish had a fragile operation going on in North America. It is more accurate to say they were permitted to remain in many Indigenous homelands than to say the Spanish conquered the entire swath of land that we usually see history books call “New Spain.” Sandos shows this by highlighting Indigenous resistance to Spanish control. I still felt like he presumed the Spanish the more powerful culture in encounters with Native Americans, but he cracks the illusion of titanic conquest too.
November 17, 2022
A Scholarly Investigation
Converting California is a must read for those interested in California mission. This is an in-depth look at the history of the missions and the attempts, successes and failures of converting the Indians to the faith.
Converting California is a must read for those interested in California mission. This is an in-depth look at the history of the missions and the attempts, successes and failures of converting the Indians to the faith.
January 29, 2011
James Sandos does a pretty good job of describing the complex relationship between Native Americans and Spaniards and dispelling the myth that they were two monolithic groups. It was nice to read a book that places local history into national importance, but it was definitely a little dry at times.
November 25, 2015
I liked this book because i grew up in Calif and on my summer vacations we went to see every mission and they are loaded with history.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews