I fell into a very surprising conversation with a young-ish woman in the bookstore of the Santa Barbara Mission, as I was photographing some of the Mission’s historical photographs. She said she thought that the native peoples had “willingly volunteered’ to work for the Franciscan friars at the various Missions around California.
She was absolutely shocked when I told her that the Chumash people, as well as the other Native tribes, had been enslaved and forced to build the Missions. And build the water system from the hills to the Mission. And tend the orchards and herds. All of it involuntary — under the watchful eyes and guns of the Mexican militia. (At the time the Missions were built, California belonged to Spain, then later to Mexico.)
Prior to the advent of the Europeans via Mexico the Chumash people had numbered in the tens of thousands and had occupied about 7000 square miles of land extending from Paso Robles to Malibu. It was a very good life for them: good climate. Plenty of food. Not a lot of enemies. Today the Chumash Santa Inez tribe survivors own a 127 acre reservation with a casino on it north of Santa Barbara. 249 people live on the reservation; others live nearby. The Chumash were not the only people to suffer this enslavement. I have written elsewhere about the San Gabriel Mission Church, museum and gardens built by the Tongva people.
The Friars were not the only ones who treated the natives badly. In the book ‘Two Years Before the Mast‘, Bostonian Richard Henry Dana describes the Californios–as the Mexican landowners in California were called at that point–as only interested in riding horses, wearing beautiful clothes and going to parties. All the work on their massive cattle ranches was done by native peoples. The cattle were grown for their hides, which were sent back to New England on ships like the one Dana worked on. The hides were made into shoes.
I hadn’t intended to write about all this. My plan, after viewing the orchid show, had been to photograph some of the restoration work going on at Santa Barbara’s historic sites. The residence of the Guerra family, major Californio landowners in the area, has been privately restored and is now a commercial space. The old Presidio, the headquarters for the militia and other government offices, is also being restored. As beautiful as these building are, it is a good idea to keep in mind the conditions of the workers who actually created them–not just the people who owned them.
