Native AlienationNative Alienation

"Despite their explicit goals of colonization and conversion, California missions are just beginning to receive more robust critical scholarly attention that centers Indigenous perspectives on their complex histories and legacies. In this book, Charles Sepulveda foregrounds concerns of gender, sexuality, enslavement, and genocide in reconsidering Spanish mission histories."--
"Sites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region's Indigenous peoples. Yet mainstream California history still largely presents a romanticized portrait of the twenty-one Spanish missions created between San Diego and Sonoma in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Providing a corrective, Charles A. Sepulveda reconstructs the violence toward Native people as well as the resistance and refusals of his ancestors and other Native people during and after the Spanish genocide. The conquest enforced the attempted spiritual possession of Native souls and the physical possession of Native bodies and the land. Sepulveda's history confronts the erasure of Indian individuality and the relationship between enslavement, dispossession, and environmental degradation. He also illuminates the mission system's central role in destroying Indigenous people's relationships to the land and examines its centuries-long impact on the lives of Native people."--