California indigenous scholars talk on genocide: Talk on history of California Indians: https://www.youtube.com/embed/qUCCysmBOng
"Telling thr truth about California missions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2akBgn535c
Peter Hardenman Burnett, the state’s first governor, saw indigenous Californians as lazy, savage and dangerous. Though he acknowledged that white settlers were taking their territory and bringing disease, he felt that it was the inevitable outcome of the meeting of two races. (https://www.history.com/news/californias-little-known-genocide)
“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected,” he told legislators in the second state of the state address in 1851. “While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.”
https://www.newsweek.com/2016/08/26/california-native-americans-genocide-490824.html
History has been kind to Padre Junipero Serra (1713-1784): founder of the California Missions, beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987. Pope Francis canonized Padre Serra on September 23, 2015, during a Mass in Washington, DC.
History has generally forgotten Captain Felipe de Neve (1724-1784), Spanish governor of Alta California and Serra’s political opponent. Serra, dogmatically believing his and God’s purpose were indistinguishable, thwarted Neve’s attempts to inventory mission supplies, as required by First Commandant General Teodoro de Croix, King Carlos of Spain’s emissary. Instead, Serra sent his mission inventories to the Pope in Rome. Spain supplied the money and supplies; accounting for both went to Rome. The result was widespread over-stocking and hiding of mission supplies by the padres.
Both Serra and Neve had differing visions of the future for California Indians brought up in the missions (neophytes) who faced the end of Spanish control of Alta California, and encroachment of the “Anglos” from the East. For Serra, God’s protection would suffice. For Neve, security came through a return to self-sufficiency, independent from the missions. Serra won, Neve lost, and the mission Indians were decimated.
Neve's comments on Serra: "There is no mischief these religious will not attempt if exasperated, such is their boundless unbelievable pride. My politeness and moderation over more than four years have not been enough to turn them from the hostility with which they engage in surreptitious conspiracies against the government and its laws. There is no means whatsoever they would scorn.” (Neve to Croix, March 26, 1781). (Edwin A. Beilharz, Felipe De Neve, First Governor of California, California Historical Society, 1971, page 154)
Neve's comments on Serra: "Serra possessed also, however, the subtlety of the serpent. His cunning was such that at times it looked like willful deceit." There are strong suggestions that Serra and Neve felt a real personal antipathy toward each other. . . . If the friars insisted, as they did that the mission Indians were not ready for even the limited forms of self-government that Neve wished to institute, it may be remarked that under the system the missions used they would never become ready.” (Beilharz, pp. 134-135)
Alta California is a fiction couched within actual historical events that took place between 1777 and 1784 in Las Californias, New Spain. Throughout I have tried to keep Paco Palido's story, the fiction, in the foreground, not letting it get subsumed beneath historical events.
Below are the historically accurate elements mentioned in Alta California: