The Beauty of theBells Why the campaign to erase the legacy of California’s first evangelizers is based more on fiction than facts BY GREGORY ORFALEA / ANGELUS 10 • ANGELUS • <strong>August</strong> 2-9, <strong>2019</strong>
Statues of Confederate generals brought down or repositioned. McSherry Hall at Georgetown University renamed because Father William McSherry sold slaves. What’s in a name? What’s in a statue? Are California’s 585 mission bells along the road next in this flurry of reassessment of representational history that includes aggrieved people, questions about the nature of art, and a selective rendering of what took place long ago? What, exactly, is a symbol and what force — moral, spiritual, or otherwise — does it have? Californians take pride in the weathered old bells on their staffs spaced along U.S. Route 101 and offshoot roads taken by original padres. When I was a child, my heart quickened at their sight, for it meant my parents and us kids were on the road and would soon be taking in a mission or two on our way to the mountains, the beach, the desert, or Lake Tahoe. Spotting the road bells meant inner joy, as it did later for my wife and our kids. Even as we age, I hear those bells inside when I pass and my heart is glad. But for some, that bell on the road is an insult, and echoes with something akin to Julius Caesar’s infamous summary of laying waste to Gaul: “I came. I saw. I conquered.” To Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band near Gilroy, those bells mean, as he put it, “We conquered you, we controlled you, we destroyed you.” And since the missions and their bells were erected by the Spanish Franciscans, there’s no mistaking who Lopez accuses: the followers of St. Francis of Assisi. So much for talking to animals, right? After many years of trying, in June of this year Lopez was able to get one bell removed from the University of California Santa Cruz campus. But what of Mission San Luis Rey, where several hundred Luiseno Indians ran into the water off Oceanside to beg Father Antonio Peyri not to go back to Spain as he boarded a ship, but to stay with them where he had served them for three prosperous and peaceful decades? What of St. Junípero Serra’s death at Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel, where 600 Esselen and Rumsen Costanoan Indians fell weeping, many cutting off talismans from his robe and even his hair? What of that all-Indian orchestra at Mission San Antonio that played original works? Were those performed without pride or joy? Were the Indian singers at Carmel whom the celebrated author Robert Louis Stevenson said sang in 1879 with such profundity merely faking it? Was there no music in those bells? In a June ceremony, California Gov. Gavin <strong>News</strong>om apologized to the state’s 600,000 Native Americans at a June ceremony, calling what happened to their ancestors in the takeover by Europeans “genocide.” Undoubtedly it was. And shameful. But who was responsible for it — the Spaniards or the Americans? To understand the legacy of the bells, that and other questions need to be answered. The role that microbes of infection played in this tragedy, for example, must be understood. The treatment of Indians by the Franciscans, a source of many accusations against the Spaniards, must be examined with context and a careful attention to statistics. And the good works, especially those of radical mercy, of Serra and the Franciscans cannot be ignored. Who committed genocide? On the question of genocide there is no less an authority than James Sandos, Ph.D., Farquhar Professor of the American Southwest at the University of Redlands. In 2010, he told a large gathering of mostly Native Americans at the California Indian Conference in Irvine that the “comparison [of Franciscan acts] to genocide is totally false.” The true culprit? “The U.S. government paying people to slaughter others, that’s genocide,” Sandos said at the event. On the same panel with Sandos was reputable mission-era historian WIKIMEDIA COMMONS One of California’s many historic El Camino Real bells. <strong>August</strong> 2-9, <strong>2019</strong> • ANGELUS • 11