I read with interest the letter “An apology is in order” (July 16) regarding the removal of the statue of Junipero Serra from the SLO Mission. The author presents Serra as a defender of California’s indigenous people and calls into question the foundation for SLO Mayor Heidi Harmon’s comment that it was a relief to see the monument no longer in our open space.
It doesn’t take much more than a Google search to find the violent history of the Spanish conquest of Alta California and Serra’s contribution to it. Serra directly led the founding of the first nine missions, which served the political, economic, and religious goals of his monarch. Indigenous people were coerced to convert and then barred from returning to their families. Entire communities were decimated by the disease and abuse they brought.
Violet Sage Walker, vice chair of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, has been asking for the statue’s removal for more than three decades, and is in complete agreement with the permanent removal of the statue. “There are no memorials to our people. There are no markers to the hundreds of our people who died building the mission and are buried in and around the grounds. We only find them when someone wants to bulldoze the area to put in a road.”
I was raised up to romanticize the padres and the missions. I studied and taught about them in school. The thing is, I now know that what I learned was a story—a way to justify the subjugation of a vibrant civilization. The discomfort I feel facing the truth cannot begin to approach the pain and disrespect Indigenous Californians feel walking past a memorial to a person who was responsible for the devastation of their culture. The removal of this statue is long overdue.
In the words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” We know better now. It’s time we do better.
Rosemary Wrenn
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Jul 23 – Aug 2, 2020.
And Serra and his ilk were just the beginning! After annexation by the United States in 1848, California’s first governor issued scalp bounties for Native Americans and forced removal from areas with high economic potential. The years following California statehood in 1850 were nothing less than “ethnic cleansing.” The treaty ending the war with Mexico extended U.S. citizenship to Mexican residents of California. But, Mexican citizens who were Native American were stripped of their citizenship by U.S. authorities in violation of the treaty and reclassified as “resident aliens”. A fate shared by all Native Americans until an Act of Congress in 1924 declared them “U.S. citizens.” So, when the Census takers came by in 1850 and 1852, you had to ponder the question, are you “Mexican” or “Indian”? Many Native Americans declared themselves to be “Mexican” in order to have the protections of citizenship.
Such an excellent summary Rosemary. It’s interesting when the truth as you described is buried in the archives, absent in school history books, but eventually revealed, much to the dismay of millions of followers who have been told an alternate story for hundreds of years. Again, this gets back to people who hear only what they want to hear then disregard the rest.