California Missions SLO Exercise (ASSIGNMENT)

This assignment is due Friday, March 22 at 11:59 PM.  Late submissions will be accepted for ten days through Monday, April 1, and a one-grade late deduction will be added to your score. This assessment will ask you to do several things:

1. Read/view a set of primary sources, including art works, related to the founding and development of the Spanish mission system in California

2. Analyze and synthesize primary and secondary sources in response to a historical thesis or question.

3. Articulate a cause or consequence of the event represented by the sources.

4. Describe one historical personality involved in this event and explain his or her significance in this event.

Write your answers directly into Canvas. Do not send back any files.

Here is the nuts-and-bolts video on the SLO exercise that was recorded in 2019.  This video was recorded with the Camtasia software and it does include the closed-captioning feature.  Just click the “CC” icon on the YouTube viewer to access the subtitles.

**NOTE: For this exercise, you are encouraged to bring in any information that you’ve learned about the historical period/topic from lecture, textbook, primary source documents, films and other sources. The term “secondary sources” refers to outside materials, including readings from “Between the Conquests.”**

Formal Instructions:

Read/view the attached set of primary sources, (the Father Duran and Indian laborer drawings, and the Father Jayme and La Perouse documents)

Address the following thesis statement: How do these sources prove that the policies of the Spanish Crown and Franciscan officials directly contributed to the cultural destruction of the California native populations as the mission system was being established? Explain in at least 5-6 sentences (based on your analysis of the primary and secondary sources) how the sources prove the thesis statement?

Articulate a cause or consequence of the California Mission system represented by the sources. Name and describe one cause or consequence of an event discussed in these sources in at least 5-6 sentences:

Describe one historical personality involved in this event ( the California Mission system) and explain his or her significance in this event. Name one person involved in this event. Why was that person significant?  Compose your answer in at least 5-6 sentences:

History 115 SLO Assessment: Set of Primary Source Documents

Source #1: Father Narciso Duran and Child, Mission San Jose (1844 painting)

Source #2 Father Luis Jayme criticizes the behavior of Spanish Soldiers (1772)

With reference to the Indians, I wish to say that great progress would be made if there was anything to eat and the soldiers would set a good example. We cannot give them anything to eat because what Don Pedro has given is not enough to last half a year for the Indians from the Californias who are here. Thus little progress will be made under present conditions. As for the example to be set by the soldiers, no doubt some of them are good exemplars and deserve to be treated accordingly, but very many of them deserved to be hanged on account of the continuous outrages which they are committing in seizing and raping the women. There is not a single mission where all the gentiles have not been scandalized, and even on the roads, so I have been told. Surely, as the gentiles themselves state, they are committing a thousand evils, particularly those of a sexual nature. The fathers have petitioned Don Pedro concerning these points, but he has paid very little attention to them. He has punished some, but as soon as they promised him that they would work at the presidio, he turned them loose. That is what he did last year, but he does not even punish them or say anything to them on this point. I suppose that some ministers will write you about the cases which have occurred at other missions. I shall speak only of Mission San Diego. At one of these Indian villages near the mission of San Diego, which said village is very large, and which is on the road that goes to Monterey, the gentiles therein many times have been on the point of coming here to kill us all, and the reason for this is that some soldiers who were carrying the mail to Monterey turned their animals into the fields and they ate up their crops. Three other Indian villages about a league or a league and a half from here have reported the same thing to me several times. For this reason on several occasions where Father Francisco Dumetz or I have gone to see these Indian villages, as soon as they us they fled from their villages and fled to the woods or other remote places, and the only ones who remained in the villages were some men and some very old women. The Christians here have told me that many of the gentiles of the aforesaid villages leave their huts and the crops which they gather from the lands around their villages, and go to the woods and experience hunger. They do this so that the soldiers will not rape their women as they have already done so many times in the past. No wonder the Indians here were bad when the mission was first founded. To begin with, they did not know why they (the Spaniards) had come, unless they intended to take their lands away from them. Now they all want to be Christians because they know that there is a God who created the heavens and earth and all things, that there is a Hell, and Glory, that they have souls, etc., but when the mission was first founded they did not know these things; instead they thought they were like animals, and when the vessels came at first, they saw that most of the crews died; they were very loathe to pray, and they did not want to be Christians at all; instead they said that it was bad to become a Christian and then they would die immediately. No wonder they said so when they saw how most of the sailors and California Indians died, but now, thanks be to the Lord, God has converted them from Sauls to Pauls. They all know the natural law, which so I am informed, they have observed as well or better than many Christians elsewhere. They do not have any idols; they do not go on drinking sprees; they do not marry relatives; and they have but one wife. The married men sleep with their wives only. The bachelors sleep together and apart from the women and the married couples. If a man plays with any woman who is not his wife, he is scolded and punished by his captains. Concerning those from the Californias I have heard it said that they are given to sexual vices, but among those here I have not been able to discover a single fault of that nature. Some of the first adults whom we baptized, when we pointed out to them that it was wrong to have sexual intercourse with a woman to whom they were not married, told me that they already knew that, and that among them it was considered to be very bad, and so they do not do so at all. “the soldiers,” they told me, “are Christians and, although they know that God will punish them in Hell, do so, having sexual intercourse with our wives. We,” they said, “although we did not know that God would punish us for that in Hell, considered it to very bad, and we did not do it, and even less now that we know that God will punish us if we do so.” When I heard this, I burst into tears to see how these gentiles were setting an example for us Christians. 

Source #3 Jean Francois La Perouse Describes the Mission Indians of Carmel (1786)

The color of these Indian, which is that of Negores; the house of the missionaries; their storehouses;…the appearance of the ground on which the grain in trodden out; the cattle, the horses, everything in short, brought to our recollection a plantation at Santo Domingo or any other West Indian island. The men and women are collected by the sound of a bell; a missionary leads them to work, to the church, and to all their exercises. We observed with concern that the resemblance is so perfect that we have seen both men and women in irons, and others in the stocks. Lastly, the noise of the whip might have struck our ears, this punishment also being administered. Corporal punishment is inflicted on the Indians of both sexes who neglect the exercises of piety, and many sins, which in Europe are left to Divine justice, are here punished by irons and the stocks. And lastly, it must be observed that the moment an Indian is baptizes, the effect is the same as if he had pronounced a vow for life. If he escapes to reside with his relations in the independent villages, he is summoned three times to return; if he refuses, the missionaries apply to the governor, who sends soldiers to seize him in the midst of his family and conduct him to the mission, where he is condemned to receive a certain number of lashes with the whip. They have so little courage that they never make any resistance to the three or four soldiers who so evidently violate the rights of men in their persons. The custom is kept up because theologians have decided that they could not in conscience administer baptism to men so inconstant unless the government would in some measure serve as their sponsor and answer for their perseverance in the faith. Punishments are adjudged by Indian magistrates, called caciques. There are three in each mission…These caciques are like the overseers of a plantation: passive beings, blind performers of the will of their superiors. Their principal function…is to maintain order and the appearance of attention. Women are never whipped in public, but in an enclosed and somewhat distant place that their cries may not excite a too lively compassion, which might cause the men to revolt. The latter, on the contrary, are exposed to the view of all their fellow citizens, that their punishment may serve as an example. They usually ask pardon for their fault, in which case the executioner diminishes the force of his lashes, but the number is always irrevocable. An hour after supper, they take care to secure all the women whose husbands are absent, as well as the young girls above the age of nine years, by locking them up, and during the day they entrust them to the care of elderly women. All these precautions are still inadequate, and we must have seen men in the stocks and women in irons for having eluded the vigilance. These Indians have no knowledge of a God or of a future state… The missionaries, persuaded from their prejudices and perhaps from their experience that the reason of these men is scarcely ever developed, consider this a just motive for treating them like children, and admit only a very small number to the communion… The government is a true theocracy for the Indians, who believe that their superiors have immediate and continual communication with God, and that they cause him to descend every day on the altar. By virtue of this opinion, the holy fathers live in the midst of the villages with the greatest security. Their doors are not shut, even in the night.

Source #4: Indian neophytes were responsible for plowing acres of mission property

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