Excerpt: “Junipero Serra was a nazi not a saint!” “GENOCIDE EQUALS SAINTHOOD?” “NATIVE LIVES MATTER.” These were just a few of the slogans emblazoned on posters and banners during protests opposing the eighteenth-century priest Junípero Serra’s canonization in 2015. Accusations that Serra committed genocide also reverberated in the press. Vincent Medina—a Catholic Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Indian and the assistant to the curator at one of California’s surviving missions—told the New York Times that canonizing “the leader of the disastrous, genocidal California mission system is a way that the church further legitimized the pain and suffering of Ohlone and countless other California Indians.”
