The missions of settler colonialism: Joseph Vincent Payne, The Chumash War of 1824: Revolution and Counterrevolution in the California Missions Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and La Purísima, MA dissertation, California Polytechnic State University, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The missions of settler colonialism: Joseph Vincent Payne, The Chumash War of 1824: Revolution and Counterrevolution in the California Missions Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and La Purísima, MA dissertation, California Polytechnic State University, 2025

07Jul25

Abstract: In 1824, the Indigenous Chumash of Missions Santa Inés, Santa Barbara, and La Purísima de Concepción went to war against the settler-colonial system that bonded them to the mission lands and forced labor regime demanded by the Spanish Franciscan missionaries and compelled by Mexican military force in Alta California. The conflict lasted months and included violent battles and skirmishes at all three missions, the militant occupation and reclamation of La Purísima, a mass exodus to the interior of the territory, and the subsequent counterrevolutionary collaboration of the Spanish missionaries and Mexican military to return many (but not all) of the Chumash to the missions. In this thesis, I argue that the actions of the Chumash throughout the conflict, available through multiple archival and oral history accounts, show a people engaged in a revolutionary war for autonomy against the settler-colonial mission system. The collective action of the Chumash in 1824 created a deep fissure in the California Mission system at a time of political tumult and radical redefinition during Alta California’s early Mexican period and helped feed the intertribal coalition of Indigenous resistance in the interior of the territory. The revolutionary Chumash contributed to the instability of the settler-colonial system and partly compelled the new Mexican government’s pragmatic decision to formally end the mission system through secularization less than ten years later. This thesis attempts to place the Chumash War of 1824 in this broader context of the Age of Revolutions, New Mission History, and the legacy of genocide of Indigenous Californians in the hopes of reexamining the California Missions in pedagogy and popular historical memory by illustrating the destructive role they played in the lives of Indigenous peoples, and the agency and autonomy that the Chumash asserted to remove themselves from the yolk of the settlercolonial California Mission system.

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