Was There Violence At The California Missions?

The California Missions have a dark history that is not covered in classrooms or at the Missions themselves. As such, questions arise. Was there violence at the California Missions? Was there corporal punishment, sexual assault, violent assault, rebellious violence, etc? How did this violence play out in mission life? Why and how did it occur? Fourth graders in California’s public school system are taught a very cleaned up version of history regarding the California missions. The brutality of the mission system is not mentioned or described at the missions or in classrooms. However, the California Missions were such a brutal system that effectively was responsible for the mass genocide of the Indigenous tribes in California. Violence was a

However, there were Franciscans who got carried away with their ideas of punishment and ended up bringing about their own downfall. One prime example of this was Padre Andres Quintana, who decided to make corporal punishment even more extreme and painful for the Indigenous at the Missions with the introduction of a metal-tipped whip to punish them, “ The man who worked inside the plaza of the mission, named Donato, was punished by Father Quintana with a whip with wire. With each blow, it cut his buttocks...Donato wanted vengeance. He was the one who organized a gathering of 14 men...It should be noted that the Padre wished all the people to gather in the plaza on the following Sunday in order to test the whip that he had made with pieces of wire to see if it was to his liking”. This truly diabolical device made by Quintana himself no doubt made him highly unpopular amongst the natives at the Mission and did not help Indigenous-Franciscan relations. It is not surprising as such that the Indigenous got fed up with Quintana and decided to give him a taste of his own medicine after luring him into a trap by making Quintana performing the Catholic sacrament

Sexual assault was a massive problem that led to bigger problems, including further alienation and greater conflict between the indigenous tribes in California and the Franciscans who were trying to impose their European ideas of civilization. Sexual assault was a major problem that, as Antonia Castaneda in her book states, “sexual assaults against native women began shortly after the founding of the presidio and mission at Monterey in June 1770...and continued throughout the length of California. The founding of each new mission and presidio brought new reports of sexual violence”. This last part is particularly important because accounts do exist of the soldiers that were supposed to be carrying out their duties at the local presidios were instead going out to find indigenous women to satisfy their sexual desires and thus committing atrocities of the worst kind to Indigenous women. Father Luis Jayme provided an account of the evils that the soldiers brought onto indigenous women and mentioned a case where a group of soldiers had gone into a village and raped various women, “Soldier Castelo carried a gentile woman into a corral...When he had raped her, the said soldier came out of the corral and the soldier Juan