Abuse of California Indians in the Missions

Most non-Indian Americans are ignorant of the full scope of maltreatment received by American Indians by the Spanish, British (then Americans after them), or French.

Indian Country Today has a great article by Stephen Newcomb on how Indians were mistreated in the Spanish Missions in California. The goal of the missions were clear from the beginning, based on papal bulls that considered non-Catholics to be barely human.

The purpose of the missions were the ''spiritual and temporal conquest'' of California, as well as the "spiritual conquest and conversion of the infidels.'' The infidels were the Indians. Exacerbating the problem was that even after conversion to Catholicism, the Indians were treated just as badly as before.

Conquest is one aspect of the paradigm of domination that underlies the colonizing mission of the Vatican and the Catholic Church in the Americas, in keeping with papal decrees that called for the ''subjugation'' of ''barbarous nations.'' As part of this charge, one task of the church was to break the free spirit of and ''reduce'' those who were ''not of the faith.'' Spiritual conquest involved the use of spirit-breaking techniques that served as part of the arsenal that was employed against the originally free and independent Indian nations and peoples of California. They were more slaves than anything else. They were given so few rations and worked so hard that the life expectancy from resulting disease and starvation was only six years after entering a mission.

Nine out of ten births were stillborn. When a woman gave birth to a stillborn baby, she was punished.

Hugo Reid told of what happened to an Indian woman who had a stillborn child: ''When a woman had the misfortune to bring forth a stillborn child, she was punished. The penalty was shaving the head, flogging for 15 subsequent days, iron on the feet for three months, and having to appear every Sunday in church, on the steps of the alter, with a hideous painted [effigy] child in her arms.''

The Indians were routinely beat and abused by the mission priests. So inhumane was it that Hugo Reid's report of conditions at the Missions couldn't even describe the inhumanity fully.

Reid wrote of Mission San Gabriel: ''So as not to make a revolting picture, I will bury acts of barbarity known to me through good authority, by merely saying that Father Zalvidea must have considered whipping [to be] meat and drink to them, for they [the Indians] had it morning, noon, and night.''

Americans were sometimes less barbaric than the Spanish, but only by degrees. The Trail of Tears showed that Americans were only too willing to engage in barbarity against Indians, even those who had converted to Christianity and became "civilized" by American definitions. They put us in concentration camps with insufficient rations and clean water, disease running rampant. They forced us on a death march in Winter where 25% of our nation died. Countless other tribes have stories of similar barbarity on the part of a supposedly "Christian" nation.

Neither the American government, Spanish government, nor the Vatican have acknowledged or apologized for the abuse and human rights violations against American Indians.