Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who Pope Francis plans to canonize during his first trip to the United States this week, advocated and oversaw the whipping, beating, flogging and extermination of Native Americans in what is now California. Serra, the founder of the state’s first mission in San Diego in 1769, will be the first saint canonized on American soil.

At that time, according to records kept by the missions, the state’s indigenous population ranged from 133,500 to 350,000. As a result of enslavement, malnutrition and the introduction of diseases, the missions were responsible for the deaths of 62,000 indigenous Californians from 1769 to 1833. This genocide is just another disgraceful example of Native American history that is forgotten, whitewashed or ignored.



My ancestors and many living family members are descendants of the Pomo tribe of Northern California. The only reason I’m here today writing this piece is because my ancestors didn’t live near any of the state’s 21 Franciscan missions.

Elias Castillo, a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, spent seven years researching and reading books published by the Franciscans, which include letters written by Serra himself. In his book A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Native Americans by the Spanish Missions, Castillo doesn’t mince words when he describes the missions as “death camps run by friars where thousands of California’s Indians perished.” In letters, Serra wrote that he considered the indigenous population to be “barbarous pagans,” and that only Catholicism could save them from evil.



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When the King of Spain sent Jesuit priests to prevent Russian fur hunters from claiming the region, he directed them to educate and baptize native peoples so they could become Spanish citizens, but Serra had other plans. He brutally converted them to Christianity and wiped out entire cultures, languages and villages in the process.

Under Serra’s leadership, soldiers violently captured California’s Native Americans, forced them into labor and imprisoned them until they died. According to Castillo’s exhaustive research, they were beaten, flogged and placed in shackles that didn’t allow them to bend their knees for days. If they grieved over the loss of loved ones, they were whipped. Mothers who had miscarriages were not allowed to mourn; instead, they were accused of having abortions and then forced to hold a carved figure of an infant while standing outside of a mission church.

“Women are never whipped in public, but in an enclosed and somewhat distant place that their cries may not excite a too lively compassion, which might cause the men to revolt,” wrote a shocked French admiral Captain Jean-Francois de Galaup during a visit to Mission Carmel in 1786.

Castillo estimates that very few Californians today are aware of this brutal history, which he says has been “deliberately falsified by the state of California.” Fourth graders are taught that Serra was a peaceful man who cared for the indigenous population. Tourists who visit the state’s missions learn that Serra’s relationship with Native Americans was based on mutual respect.

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Seeing Serra glorified on historical monuments, school, highway and road signs, and statues, including one inside of the United States Capitol building, is a painful reminder for Native Americans of this tragic history. In May, Pope Francis referred to Serra as “one of the founding fathers of the United States.” How can this be when hundreds of thousands of people lived here for generations before he arrived?

To see Serra canonized will only deepen generations of trauma among Native Americans. “It is an illness that persists in many of our tribal members today,” writes Valentin Lopez, Chair of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of the Coastanoan/Ohlone people in the forward of Cross of Thorns. “Issues of alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide and poverty among our people are directly linked to this history.”

Rather than turn Serra into a saint on Wednesday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC, the Pope, the Catholic Church, and the state of California should listen to Native groups protesting the canonization and instead use this moment to tell the truth about the missions and their deadly impact on California’s Native Americans. Pope Francis should meet with members of the California’s tribes, acknowledge these atrocities and allow healing and reconciliation to begin. It’s long overdue.



