Review: Native Alienation: Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions , by Charles A. Sepulveda

This is not the rosy tale of benevolent Franciscan friars saving souls and puttering around their mission gardens that clings so tenaciously to California’s colonial imaginary. It is a history told by California Indians whose names and stories of resistance to mission violence Charles Sepulveda excavates from the colonial archives and “retrofits” (13)—emancipating them from narratives in which their voices and truths are subverted to serve the purposes of priests, soldiers, historians, anthropologists, and mission apologists. Centering Taraaxam/Tongva and Acjachemen ancestors, descendants, and their unceded homelands in the greater Los Angeles Basin and southern Channel Islands, it is also a meditation on the persistence of genocidal conditions wrought by the missions, which brutally dispossessed California Indians of intergenerational connections to ancestral knowledge, waters, lands, and worlds, and on the ongoing struggle to create a decolonial future.Finding settler colonial theory inadequate to the task of explicating the complex dimensions of separation and loss effected by dispossession, Sepulveda—assistant professor of ethnic studies at the University of California Riverside—deploys the concept of spiritual conquest to show that alienation was all encompassing: a total theft and reconfiguration of social bonds, obligations, and belonging to kin and place. Some may quibble with his reading of settler colonial theory, but the heuristic value of spiritual conquest and otherworldly possession is evident in his analysis. He explains: “My use of possession to explain conquest is slippery, as double entendre takes advantage of the dual meaning of possession: (1) the state of having, owning, or controlling something; and (2) the state of being controlled by a demon or spirit” (9).Sepulveda renders this exegesis across five chapters: “Slavery and Disavowal: Native Alienation,” “Hallucinations of the Spanish Imaginary: Mission Revival Architecture,” “Apocalyptic Colonialism: Environmental Devastation of Wanáw Waníicha / Kahoo’ Paxaayt / Santa Ana River,” “Canonization Fodder: Resisting the Canonization of Junípero Serra,” and “Ramona Redeemed? The Politics of Recognition and Rematriation.” Some of this ground is well-trodden within California and mission studies historiography, though not so much by those at the sharp end of the stick. As the author notes in the first chapter, Rupert Costo (Cahuilla) stands out as a rare, early exception. This only partly explains why the question of whether Indians were enslaved at the missions has hinged for so many scholars over the years upon meeting the definition of chattel slavery. Sepulveda pushes beyond this impasse through recourse to Orlando Patterson’s theorization of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” (33). Working his way through each of these components—total powerlessness, natal alienation, and sociopsychological disorder—he shows that missions enslaved California Indians not only as fungible bodies in the service of compulsory manual, sexual, and reproductive labor but also as souls to be forcibly “possessed” by Christianity.Subsequent chapters follow this pattern. Chapter 2 connects spiritual conquest to the origins and embodiment of the Spanish fantasy past in early twentieth-century Mission Revival architecture. Situating this movement within a larger “Spanish imaginary,” Sepulveda explains how it fostered dishonest interpretations of mission ruins, the development of Riverside’s Mission Inn Hotel and Spa, and the relocation of the Sherman Indian Boarding School, whose students were subjected not only to new regimes of spiritual conquest but also to commodification on behalf of the nearby inn. Chapter 3 extends the story of possessive violence to the damming, or “channelizing and entombment” (87), of the Santa Ana River, a poignant symbol of the post-apocalyptic world California Indians inhabit. “The river is a social-ecological dead zone—where humans no longer have a relationship with the environment. Humans treat the lower Santa Ana River as dead and non-existent…not a living being that, if taken care of, would be fully alive and provide sustenance” (88). The 2015 canonization of Junípero Serra, despite widespread California Indian protest, stands in chapter 4 as incontrovertible evidence of the continued campaign of conquest, of soul possession rooted in forced conversion. Likewise, the 780-mile pilgrimage to all twenty-one missions undertaken by Caroline Ward Holland and her son Kagen stands as one of many examples Sepulveda reviews of descendant refusal provoked by Serra’s canonization.While acknowledging the importance of Vizenor’s concept of survivance, Sepulveda is driven by a different ancestral imperative, one that speaks not only of cultural and genealogical continuance, but of the terror—and to its deniers, be they enthroned at the Vatican or posted at a mission museum turnstile. This terror is not in the past. Its spectral presence is reproduced in every generation of California Indian descendants, who must experience its violence as subjects of settler colonial statecraft. For some this involves being denied federal acknowledgment, which would enable them to begin repairing some realms of post-apocalyptic life through gaming revenue, even as it would draw them into a web of capitalist exploitation that values land not as kin or spiritual sustenance but as property. As Sepulveda illuminates in chapter 5, even the capacity to steward small, undeveloped patches of unceded ancestral lands must be negotiated with the settler state and governed by legal instruments of its own design. “Survivance can erase continual colonial dispossession(s) that have intended to alienate Indigenous people from land and the heritage of their ancestors. And it can disappear those who did not survive. Survivance shifts our focus away from the predatory logic of conquest to an emphasis on the advances (or agency) of Native people within a reality that alienates all of us from the power of the earth and sky” (143).Sepulveda’s history is steeped in an ethos of care and relationality that endures to the close of the book. It joins a growing wave of critical, cross-disciplinary scholarship on California missions sparked, in large part, by Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen scholar Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2024 2013). Native Alienation will undoubtedly inform the ongoing work to revise and deromanticize K–12 California mission history curricula and site interpretation that has long minimized or dismissed mission violence and voices of California Indian people, both then and now. Beyond its vital contributions to California history, California Indian studies, and California mission studies, Native Alienation is a significant contribution to the literature in comparative colonial history.