In September 2015, Pope Francis canonized St. Junipero Serra. Six years later, arguments about whether a statue to Serra that was removed from Sacramento last year, should be put back. Conservative Catholic media is on the case, claiming that the memory of Serra has been slandered by “deliberate disinformation.” ((For an interview regarding the canonization controversy, see https://www.wortfm.org/native-americans-protest-sainthood-of-junipero-serra/.)
In a blatant attempt at revising history, Salvatore Cordileone, the unapologetically ultra-conservative San Francisco Archbishop is appealing to Governor Gavin Newsom to stop a bill that will have the statue of Father Junipero Serra permanently removed from state grounds in Sacramento.The statue has been in storage since July 2020, when protesters removed it. A monument to Sacramento Native American tribes will replace the Serra statue.
Cordileone told the San Francisco Chronicle that: “Father Serra was in fact the founder of California and in his work here educating and evangelizing the native population did what he could to protect them and educate them. That statue is at the state Capitol which is the most appropriate place for Father Serra to be honored.”
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Cordileone and co-author, Los Angeles Archbishop JoséH. Gomez, argued that Serra was “a complex character, but he defended indigenous people’s humanity, decried the abuse of indigenous women, and argued against imposing the death penalty on natives who had burned down a mission and murdered one of his friends.”
Cordileone told the Chronicle that accusations of enslavement of adults and children, mutilation and genocide were “just not true.”“There was a lot of death due to disease for which the native population did not have immunity. That was not Father Serra’s fault. The abuse of the Indians came largely from Spanish soldiers not the missionaries.” He then added “There was corporal punishment but that was the standard of the time.”
Junípero Serra was a Franciscan friar that is seen as one of the founders of California, and the person that set in motion the establishment of a string of missions in the region starting in 1769 with the founding of one in Baja California. As San Francisco magazine’s Gary Kamiya pointed out, “Every schoolchild knows that California Indians at Serra’s missions were taught the Gospel, fed and clothed; few know that many were also whipped, imprisoned, and put in stocks.” Serra’s mission, “to convert pagan Indians into Catholic Spaniards resulted not only in the physical punishment of countless Indians, but in the death of tens of thousands of them – and, ultimately, in the eradication of their culture.”
The missions were also designed to bring native peoples a new way of life “centered around farming and ranching,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carl Nolte wrote. Nolte pointed out that “By the end of Spanish and Mexican rule in 1846, [60-+ years after Serra’s death] the native population was half what it had been when Serra first saw California.”
Assembly Member James Ramos (D-Highland, San Bernadino County), the first Native American elected to the legislature, wrote the Assembly’s version of the bill (AB 338). He described Cordileone and Gomez’s op-ed as “a paternal approach to telling Indian people, ‘Let me tell you your own history.’ The archbishop is trying to paint a picture that has been romanticized in the state. What we need is a true perspective of what happened to the California Indian people during the missionary era. Even the pope apologized in 2015 [during a trip to Bolivia) for the colonization of Native Americans.”
Jesus Tarango, chairman of the Wilton Rancheria, whose tribe was among those that sponsored AB 338 also praised the legislation passage. “A statue of Junipero Serra on Capitol grounds represents a double injury,” Tarango said. “The Miwok and Nisenan people have lived in this region since time immemorial before the hostile takeover of Native lands by settlers, land barons and gold miners who established Sacramento and the State Capitol.
“The statue of a figure that represents the mission period—another earlier time of genocide, slavery, and other degradations imposed upon California Indians—strikes twice at our history. We have yet to see a full telling of what it took to build the State Capitol and who paid that cost. This bill will begin to tell that history for us and for future generations.”
Now, having overwhelmed the opposition in the Republican Recall effort, the ball is in Governor Newsom’s court.