Spanish explorers arrived on California's coasts as early as the mid-16th century. In 1769, the first Spanish Franciscan mission was built in San Diego. Local tribes were relocated and conscripted into forced labor on the mission, stretching from San Diego to San Francisco. Disease, starvation, excessive physical labor, and torture decimated these tribes.[1] Many were baptized as Catholics by the Franciscan missionaries at the missions.
The Catholic priests forbade the Indians from practicing their native culture, resulting in the disruption of many tribes' linguistic, spiritual, and cultural practices. With no acquired immunity to the exposure of European diseases (as well as sudden cultural upheaval and lifestyle demands), the population of Mission Indians suffered high mortality and dramatic decreases, especially in the coastal regions; the population was reduced by 90 percent, between 1769 and 1848.[3]
Despite the missionaries' attempts to convert the Indigenous peoples of the missions, often referred to in mission records as "neophytes", they indicated that their attempts at conversion were often unsuccessful. For example, in 1803, twenty-eight years into the mission period, Friar Fermín de Lasuén wrote:[4]
Generally the neophytes have not yet enough affection for Christianity and civilization. Most of them are excessively fond of the mountains, the beach, and of barbarous freedom and independence, so that some show of military force is necessary, lest they by force of arms deny the Faith and law which they have professed.[4]
Abuse persisted after Mexico assumed control of the California missions in 1834. Mexico secularized the missions and transferred (or sold) the lands to other non-Native administrators or owners. Many of the Mission Indians worked on the newly established ranchos, with little improvement in their living conditions.[1]
On January 12, 1891, the US Congress passed the "An Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians in the State of California". This would further sanction the original grants of the Mexican government to the natives in southern California, and sought to protect their rights, while giving railroad corporations a primary interest.[7]
In 1927, the Sacramento Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent Lafayette A. Dorrington was instructed by Assistant Commissioner E. B. Merritt, in Washington D.C., to list the tribes in California from whom Congress had not yet purchased land, and for those lands to be used as reservations. As part of the 1928 the California Indian Jurisdictional Act enrollment, Native Americans were asked to identify their "Tribe or Band". The majority of applicants supplied the name of the mission that they knew their ancestors were associated with. The enrollment was part of a plan to provide reservation lands promised, but never fulfilled by 18 non-ratified treaties made in 1851–1852.[8]
Because of the enrollment applications, and the native American's association with a specific geographical location (often associated with the Catholic missions), the bands of natives became known as the "mission band" of people associated with a Spanish mission.[8] Some bands also occupy trust lands—Indian Reservations—identified under the Mission Indian Agency. The Mission Indian Act of 1891 formed the administrative Bureau of Indian Affairs unit which governs San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Santa Barbara Counties. There is one Chumash reservation in the last county, and more than thirty reservations in the others.
Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Ventura and Orange Counties do not contain any tribal trust lands. However, resident organizations that self-identify as Native American tribes, including self-identified Tongva in the first and Acjachemen in the last county (as well as Coastal Chumash in Santa Barbara County) continue seeking federal tribal recognition by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There are no state-recognized tribes in California.
Eleven of the southern California reservations were included under the early 20th-century allotment programs, which broke up communal tribal holding, to assign property to individual households, with individual heads of household and tribal members identified lists such as the Dawes Rolls.
Depiction of three "Indian Crones" from the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, published in "American Indians: first families of the Southwest" by John Frederick Huckel, in 1920
The most important reservations include: the Agua Caliente Reservation in Palm Springs, which occupies alternate sections (approx. 640 acres each) with former railroad grant lands that form much of the city; the Morongo Reservation in the San Gorgonio Pass area; and the Pala Reservation which includes San Antonio de Pala Asistencia (Pala Mission) of the Mission San Luis Rey de Francia in Pala. These and the tribal governments of fifteen other reservations operate casinos today. The total acreage of the mission group of reservations constitutes approximately 250,000 acres (1,000 km2).
^Davis, Lee. (1996) "California Tribes" in Encyclopedia of North American Indians. Frederick E. Hoxie, editor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. p. 95. ISBN0-395-66921-9
^Acts of the Fifty First Congress. Session II. Laws of the United States. Chapter 65 Jan. 12, 1891. 26 Stat., 712. Oklahoma State University Library website Retrieved February 22, 2017.
Du Bois, Constance Goddard. 1904–1906. "Mythology of the Mission Indians", The Journal of the American Folk-Lore Society, Vol. XVII, No. LXVI. p. 185–8 [1904]; Vol. XIX. No. LXXII pp. 52–60 and LXXIII. pp. 145–64. 1906. ("the mythology of the Luiseño and Diegueño Indians of Southern California")
Kroeber, Alfred. 1906. "Two Myths of the Mission Indians of California", Journal of the American Folk-Lore Society, Vol. XIX, No. LXXV pp. 309–21.
Pritzker, Barry M. A Native American Encyclopedia: History, Culture, and Peoples. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN978-0-19-513877-1.
Further reading
Hutchinson, C. Alan. "The Mexican Government and the Mission Indians of Upper California," The Americas 21(4)1965, pp. 335–362.
The Mission Indian (newspaper, 5 volumes). Banning, California: B. Florian Hahn. OCLC15738708
Phillips, George Harwood, "Indians and the Breakdown of the Spanish Mission System in California," Ethnohistory 21(4) 974, pp. 291–302.
Shipek, Florence C. "History of Southern California Mission Indians." Robert F. Heizer, ed. Handbook of North American Indians: California. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978.
Shipek, Florence (1988). Pushed into the Rocks: Southern California Indian Land Tenure 1767–1986. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Sutton, Imre (1964). Land Tenure and Changing Occupance on Indian Reservations in Southern California. Ph.D. dissertation in Geography, UCLA.
Sutton, Imre (1967). "Private Property in Land Among Reservation Indians in Southern California," Yearbook, Assn of Pacific Coast Geographers, 29:69–89.
Valley, David J. (2003). Jackpot Trail: Indian Gaming in Southern California San Diego: Sunbelt Publications.
White, Raymond C. (1963). "A Reconstruction of Luiseño Social Organization." University of California, Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology. Volume 49, no. 2.
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