I Hear the Mission Bells Toll

Every 4th grade aged child in the California education system, public or private, has at one point studied the California missions. Despite the growing public awareness of the assault on Indigenous peoples, California still has yet to reckon with their damage. 

In the last three years, the world has watched as our neighbors up North reckon with the discoveries of hundreds of graves at residential schools. Canada has acknowledged these deaths and the effects of residential schools for decades now. In 2012 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, a government run commission, conducted research on residential schools, releasing multiple reports on the role they played in destroying Indigenous communities. They acknowledge that the estimated graves on residential schools exceed the reality, further proved by the current number of remains discovered by First Nations. As recently as January 2023 Canada stated that compensation for those who survived and have family that were forced into residential schools will be compensated 2.09 billion dollars. The money is going to a non-profit trust, however, it’s still unclear how the money will be distributed.

The U.S. also has a history of residential or “Boarding” schools, with a total of 408 being in use from the mid 1650s to the early 1900s. In 2021, a commission was formed to further investigate the damage done to Indigenous communities by boarding schools. The Committee reached a similar consensus on the effects on Indigenous communities to Canada’s, however, according to the U.S. Department of Interior Affairs’ website were stopped because of the pandemic.

Unlike Canada, the history of U.S. boarding schools have not been taught to the American public, instead the focus turns to Missions. Most people are aware that (built from 1769 to 1823) the missions were created in an effort for the Spanish people to further establish themselves via religious conquest and colonization of Indigenous peoples.

Missions are also still widely regarded as tourist attractions, something the State of California doesn’t discourage. While they don’t encourage these visits by using it as a selling point themselves, not condemning visits and making the history public knowledge only furthers the damage. The most popular mission is San Juan Capistrano, with over 300,000 visitors each year. It’s easy to get to the missions with the closest one to NRS being Mission San Gabriel Aracángel 25.8 miles away. When I visited as a 4th grader, the entire mission came to life. Multiple schools were visiting and there were people dressed as Blacksmiths, Potterers, and even people teaching us how to store grain and make flour corn kernels. These were the “easier” and more “civilized” ways the Spanish had taught the Indigenous peoples to make their lives easier. There wasn’t a presentation on what teaching really meant, or how missions played such a big role in the erasure of Indigenous culture. The image projected, along with the history of how it’s been taught undoes the work to teach kids the true history, history that isn’t learned formally about California.

“The standards for the 2016 History and Social Sciences framework were actually adopted way back in 1998,” says Mike Torres, director of the curriculum division in the state Department of Education. This is one of the reasons why education on colonialism in California hasn’t changed. 4th grade is when every California elementary schooler learns about Missions. How can the state be supplying accurate standards if the standard for that section of history hasn’t been updated since 1998.

“To update standards takes an act of legislation. So it takes somebody in the Capitol to produce a bill to say ‘hey, we would like to update the history/social science standards.’ Then it has to pass through all of the hoops that a bill has to go through in order to be passed. Once it’s passed, that then triggers funding to be able to update a set of standards,” continued Dr. Torres. From there the Department of Education gets to work. A standard update triggers a curriculum framework and materials update as well, which is what we as students come to understand as the curriculum. The framework is what the Department of Education puts out to help aid teachers in teaching the subjects. However, the petitioning of a new bill to make updates can be bypassed through a loophole, framework can be updated every 8 years for specific content areas. The latest framework update was made in 2014 and adopted in 2016.

That framework states: “Building missions from sugar cubes or popsicle sticks does not help students understand the period and is offensive to many. Instead, students should have access to multiple sources to help them understand the lives of different groups of people who lived in and around missions, so that students can place them in a comparative context. Missions were sites of conflict, conquest, and forced labor.”

This is in acknowledgement of the fact that for decades, 4th graders in California have learned about the missions by building them from household items, such as popsicle sticks or cardboard. Though state guidelines haven’t required it, they also haven’t ever put out a statement against it until 2016. According to Dr. Torres “My response here is going to be with the caveat that I was not the division director or involved with this framework at the time of development but I would say it’s a step in the right direction. The historical knowledge for where that came from is not here at the director level.”

Although framework changes have been made, there are still simple issues that have yet to be fixed. The current language of the curriculum repeatedly uses the word “Indian” to refer to Indigenous people. Secondly, there is no authoritative Indigenous voice being taken into account when these standards are being created. There are multiple committees in charge of frameworks and standards as a whole, such as the Instructional Quality Commission, who advises the State Board of Education on matters related to curriculum and instruction. There are also specific Curriculum Framework and Evaluation Criteria Committees (CFCC) who focus on individual school subjects. Those in power are appointed by the state and are largely made up of teachers practicing in the state as well as people working in district offices. However, Senator Ben Allen and Assemblymember James Ramos are also on the committee. Teacher voices are important, as are having members of government in positions to enact change, but how can they accurately address issues in curriculums if voices pertaining to those issues are not on the committee? According to Dr. Torres, the board relies on the members of the CFCC and public comment to help shape these standards.

Be that as it may, there is no guarantee that Indigenous voices will be heard. There is no plan in place to hire Indigenous teachers and activists to share their opinions on how to teach their history while standards and frameworks are being developed. The added challenge of frameworks being updated 8 years only makes keeping the curriculum harder. The lack of change only goes to further the positive impressions 4th graded children get about missions.

Even when attending a private institution, though I was taught that the missions weren’t positive for Indigenous people, building a mission from craft supplies and visiting missions on school activity days where they did not acknowledge the history left me believing the positives still outweighed the negatives.

A mission in Arizona has taken a different approach to the problem that, perhaps, sends mixed messages. On their website they explain how the mission has flown four flags on its grounds “The Mexican flag, the Spanish flag, the American and now the Tohono O’Odham flag.” The Tohono O’Odham nation is whom the land the mission is on belongs to. It’s unclear what the message is supposed to be, especially considering that there is no information available about if the mission has performed any reparations. Is it like education in California, acknowledging but not fixing? Or is it what California hopes to be, the beginning to a process of reparations.