Damned Catholics

[Fake Messiah]

This is a good chronicle how certain figures are used to oppress people by erecting their statues and people's fight against it. This time it's a statue of a catholic saint who oppressed Natives

Toppling the Myth of saint Junípero Serra

That evening, protesters pulled down a bronze statue that had stood 30 feet high over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park for more than a century, spattering it with red paint.

The 1907 monument was a tribute to Father Junípero Serra: the 18th century Franciscan priest who presided over the colonizing Spanish mission system in California that resulted in the decimation of the Indigenous population, and who was made a saint by Pope Francis in 2015. Monuments to Ulysses S. Grant and Francis Scott Key, who both enslaved Black people, were also pulled down in the park that night.

And this past July 4, another statue of Serra was torn down in Sacramento’s Capitol Park by protesters following a day of peaceful marches by demonstrators aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement. The same day, Indigenous activists joined forces with Black Lives Matter organizers for a march in Los Angeles, calling for unity and decrying the historical 'sins' of the United States.

As statues of colonizers are brought down around California — mirroring actions against Confederate monuments further east — Serra remains a particular focus. And for years, he's been a reviled figure among many Indigenous people for his leadership over a system that resulted in the incalculable loss of Native lives, and forever altered the Indigenous way of life in California.

When it comes to Serra, this is a fight that has been sustained by Indigenous activists for decades. 

In 1768, Serra traveled north to California, and founded a string of missions stretching from San Diego to San Francisco.

If members of a nearby Indigenous tribe were baptized, they were then brought into a mission where they were ordered to abandon many aspects of their culture and customs, and forced into labor — and prevented from leaving. Anyone who tried to escape the mission was subject to being hunted down and brought back.

The Native people in Serra’s missions were subjected to physical punishments like whippings and beating, which Serra himself justified in 1780, writing "that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of [the Americas]; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule."

Thousands of Indigenous people in the missions died from exposure to European diseases and from the brutal labor they were forced to perform. It was the discovery of the missions’ birth and death rolls — and the revelation that more Native people died under Serra’s system than were born — that sparked a more widespread re-evaluation of his legacy in the 20th century.

"Here we were enslaved in the missions, and whipped and beaten," says Greg Sarris. "Up to 90% of the population [was] decimated, from which we never really recovered."

The missions “were concentration camps,” said Corine Fairbanks of the American Indian Movement Southern California in 2015, ahead of a protest at Serra’s canonization at the Carmel mission. “They were places of death.”

“Serra did not just bring us Christianity,” said academic Deborah Miranda, a member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation and author of “Bad Indians”, in 2015. “He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture.”

In 2015, Pope Francis announced his decision to make Junípero Serra a saint. The news was met with outrage in California, with protests taking place in San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, Mission Carmel and Mission San Juan Bautista.

An Indigenous-authored petition urging the pope to reconsider the canonization received over 11,000 signatures, stating that “it is imperative he is enlightened to understand that Father Serra was responsible for the deception, exploitation, oppression, enslavement and genocide of thousands of Indigenous Californians, ultimately resulting in the largest ethnic cleansing in North America.”

A week after the canonization, a statue of Serra in Monterey was decapitated. Two years later in Santa Barbara, another Serra monument at the city's mission was also decapitated and covered with red paint.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11826151/how-d...pero-serra