188 - Lee Panich and Gustavo Flores, We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of California Missions

Most histories of California treat the end of the missions as an epilogue. The padres leave, secularization happens, and the story skips ahead to the Bear Flag and the Gold Rush. In this episode I talk with archaeologist Lee Panich (Santa Clara University) and historian Gustavo Flores about their book We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of California Missions. They argue that the decades after secularization were among the most important in Native California history.

Lee and Gustavo combine archaeology, close reading of Spanish and Mexican archives, and collaboration with the Muwekma Ohlone community. With those sources they trace how California moved from a colonialism built on Native labor to one built on taking Native land, and how Ohlone people fought to hold on to it. We talk about:

• What archaeology can show about daily mission life that the written record leaves out
• The historiography of the missions, from Franciscan hero stories to reckonings with genocide and colonialism
• Balancing narratives of damage with narratives of survival and persistence
• “Missionary colonialism” versus “settler colonialism,” and why the shift may start in 1833 rather than 1846
• Gustavo’s discovery of an 1842 indictment recording a Native plot against José de Jesús Vallejo over an 18,000-acre land grant
• A Franciscan priest testifying in 1854 that Indians had owned the land “from time immemorial”
• Central Valley Yokuts and Miwok resistance leaders, including Estanislao and Yoscolo
• Ohlone land grants beneath today’s Silicon Valley, and a 9,000-to-11,000-year-old cemetery found during construction of a data center
• Santa Clara University’s Ohlone History Working Group and its memorial to the more than 7,600 people in the mission burial records

Book recommendations from my guests:

• Jose Maria Amador and Lorenzo Asisara oral memoirs, translated and edited by Gregorio Mora-Torres
• A new graphic novel about Yoscolo by Arturo Villarreal
• We Are Not Animals by Martin Rizzo-Martinez
• Unrecognized in California by Olivia Chilcote
• Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel