Undermining the mission of settler colonialism: Abel R. Gomez, “’We Survived This’: California Missions, Colonialism, and Indigenous Belonging’, Political Theology, 2023 | settler colonial studies blog

Undermining the mission of settler colonialism: Abel R. Gomez, “’We Survived This’: California Missions, Colonialism, and Indigenous Belonging’, Political Theology, 2023

25Jul23

Abstract: The California mission system linked Spanish Catholic and political institutions. To secure land and convert Indigenous peoples, the Spanish built 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma in the 18th and 19th centuries. These missions were sites of disease, violence, and mass death. They were also places built by Native people, on Native lands, where they lived, prayed, and were buried. As a result, missions are fundamentally Indigenous places and important touchstones for descendants today. This article examines such meanings in the lives of several Ohlone peoples, Indigenous peoples of the San Francisco-Monterey region. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Ohlone tribes, I argue that we can understand relationships they sustain with California missions by considering such places as Indigenous cemeteries, Indigenous churches, and especially both. While dominant narratives restrict “missionized” Indigenous peoples to an irrecoverable past, this paper theorizes California mission as sites of violence, survival, and belonging to homeland.

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