Challenges the romantic portrayal of Spanish missions
Sites of slavery and spiritual conquest, the California missions played a central role in the brutal subjugation of the region's Indigenous peoples. Mainstream California history, however, still largely presents a romanticized portrait of the creation of the twenty-one Spanish missions between San Diego and Sonoma in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Providing a corrective to this benign historiography, Charles A. Sepulveda reconstructs the violence toward Native people as well the resistance and refusals of his ancestors and other Native people during and after the Spanish genocide.
The conquest enforced the attempted spiritual possession of Native souls and the physical position of Native bodies and the land. At the same time, it strengthened the Spanish view of California's Indigenous people as disposable. Sepulveda demonstrates how enslavement was a key method of conquest, putting to rest the myth of the Spanish as benevolent and beneficial. Centering the experiences of Native peoples, Sepulveda brings to light the gendered dimensions of the conquest and genocide. His fuller history confronts the erasure of Indian individuality and resistance and historicizes the relationship between enslavement, dispossession, and environmental degradation. He also illuminates the mission system's central role in destroying Indigenous people's relationships to the land while examining the practice's centuries-long impact on the lives of Native people.
A groundbreaking reconsideration, Native Alienation transforms our understanding of California Indian history.

Charles Sepulveda is an assistant professor of ethnic studies at University of Utah. He received his PhD in ethnic studies from University of California, Riverside in 2016. This is his first book.

Charles A. Sepulveda's profile page

Charlotte Coté is a professor in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions (University of Washington Press, 2010).

Charlotte Coté's profile page

Coll Thrush is professor of history at the University of British Columbia and the author of two books: Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (University of Washington Press, 2007), and Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale, 2016) and coeditor of Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History (University of Nebraska Press, 2011). He serves as a series editor for the University of Washington Press's Indigenous Confluences series.

Coll Thrush's profile page