s01e01 Instruments of Colonization

For people who are Catholic today, they may just associate bells with church services, but in the mission context they served more of a daily life control purpose. For me, the bells signify a period where new meaning, new values, and new ways of life were imposed on the landscape here in California. Basically, these were instruments of control. That same spirit of surveillance is being extended by the sound of the bells themselves. So even if the fires aren't looking at you, the bell carries their message and their potential threat of violence or discipline if you aren't following the rules. Welcome to Challenging Colonialism, a podcast dedicated to amplifying the voices of Indigenous California. An important note from the start, the producers are two white male educator academics, and these are not our stories. This podcast will center native voices and our intention is to highlight the significant work being done by Indigenous communities to challenge ongoing colonialism, and to broadcast information about the resistance and resilience of Indigenous California in the past, the present, and the future. A final note before we begin, this podcast may contain graphic descriptions of slavery, genocide, and sexual violence. Welcome to Episode 1, Instruments of Colonization. My name is Bernard Gordillo, and I am a musicologist. I research the history of music and sound in Latin America and its relations with the United States. I'm particularly interested in the nature and function of church bells in the California missions, both over the course of their history and present a relevance to the California Indians. The El Camino Real Bell marker was a symbol that came out of a wave of revival movements in California during the last decades of the 19th century. These movements contributed to defining state identity and culture while they sought to attract tourism and settlement. A preservationist organization called the El Camino Real Association of California appropriated the Mission Bell as its emblem, in working towards reviving and reconstructing the path of the Spanish colonial roads that once connected the missions. Themselves having co-opted native trading routes, the bell markers were used as landmarks to guide motorists on a very modern and non-religious pilgrimage across the state. My name is Valentin Lopez, and I'm the chairman of the Amamutin Tribal Band. Well, they wanted to bring more tourism to California, and they wanted to bring more tourism to the missions. And they think that there is honoring this wonderful historical period, and it brings back these feelings of nostalgia. But when we see it, those sides represent to us the domination of those missions, the way they dominated our people, the way they separated our families, the way they destroyed our cultures and our spirituality, the way they would go out and forcefully capture the people, and march them to the missions. My name is Eve Chavez. I am Tongba from the Los Angeles Basin, and I am an assistant professor in the history of our and visual culture department at UC Santa Cruz. I should acknowledge that growing up in California, I had a different view of them than I do now as a trained academic. I think I just kind of took them for granted as well, this is part of California. It's part of the California landscape that we see. They'll come in order, they'll all bells throughout the state, you're driving up the highway, you see them, it's like, "Okay, well this is just the California thing." And they're somehow tied to the missions. I didn't learn until later that actually those bells are not from the mission era. They're just meant to evoke the mission era, but really were put in place in the early 20th century by Anglo-American mission boosters wanted to promote tourism to the missions. So that's another complicated layer to this whole history of the missions and the Spanish fantasy heritage that has shaped California landscape. And when I see these bells today, I think, wow, the Spanish really left a legacy that later set were colonists for lack of a better word, embraced. And in the process continued to erase an indigenous presence. If someone wanted to make an argument that these were part of the mission history, then that's not accurate. These are anachronistic emblems of what Anglo-American settlers thought California stood for. My name is Jagos Valizard, which, and I teach at the American Studies, at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdaisk, which is in Poland. Also, the way I see this, the El Camino-Ral bells, I see this as part of this larger movement towards invented tradition. So I see this in California, especially in the context of the arrival of new settlers, new residents to California. And the desire to create a kind of a sense of history. The other thing, of course, was the booster, the booster's goal, which was to boost the value of the land. You imbue the land with that historical value. You imbue with something, and you, with the values like romantic values, you know, the values associated with the missions that are produced at the close of the 19th century. Of course, everything is idealized. The missions were the paradise, where Indians happily worked with their fathers, quote unquote, which is the mission padrists. So this is a kind of an image of an idyllic past, now gone. But we are claiming this past as our own lineage. Add to this also the automobile collapse and the native daughters of the Golden West and the native sense of the Golden West, all kinds of organizations that are investing in this. What we now understand is a fabricated version of history. Many people realize that they just think, oh, well, that's what California is. They don't recognize that there were people here before Spanish settlers or colonists rather arrived. So that's troubling, I would say. Yes, it's part of an aspect of California's heritage, but it is damaging to the indigenous communities. The bell markers became symbols of civic pride for California. The hundreds of bell markers present today continue to promote this pride in state heritage. The question is, whose heritage does it belong to? We've begun with some historical context of the El Camino Real of bell markers. Who put them on the highways and why they're there? You heard from Eve Chavez, Alexi Segona, Annie Danis, Bernard Gordillo, Valentin Lopez, and Gregor Velasarvitz. In the next segment, we'll hear about the significance of the actual mission bells historically during the Spanish conquest and the colonial occupation of California. The purpose of the bells in relation to controlling native California people and why they're extremely problematic reminders of California's colonial past. You'll hear more from Annie Danis, Bernard Gordillo, and Gregor Velasarvitz. So my name is Annie Danis, and I'm an interdisciplinary researcher and a lecturer at UC Berkeley and Stanford University here in California. Archaeologists are big fans of things you can map. So the spatial relationship between things, objects, how things are left behind is really important to building an understanding of experience in the past, a power of relationships. But sometimes this leaves out an important element of human experience. So a spatial sonic model of Franciscan mission combines an understanding of how things like buildings and hills and walls organize a person's experience in the past. That's the spatial part and what the space sounded like. That's the sonic part. So you have the mission quadrangle, which is the church, the convento, the residential buildings, and that's the architectural space of the mission itself, which is where most research up until now has focused. And that architecture was part of this project of control because you bring people inside some walls, you're penning them in, you're making a statement. So a native California person might have felt contained by the walls around a mission quadrangle around the church and the sort of domestic buildings of the main part of the mission. Also have felt some sense of mission control, like even if they were outside of those walls solely because they could hear the activities of the mission. Mission bells imposed European time and order over native lands across Alta California. They were a fundamental tool of Spanish colonialism and Christianization on the American continent. The Franciscans used bells to regiment life in the missions. The bells were integral mediums employed in the Christian conversion of native peoples. So four friars and believers, the bell marks times of worship and it in sort of Catholic doctrine at the time has a material relationship to divinity. So the sound of the bell itself makes a connection between the listener and God. So there's a very sacred aspect to the sound of the bells that has very meaningful symbolism within Catholicism at the time, especially. They're also used to mark time. So the those times of worship become also times of breaking up the day and organizing your labor and what you do. And so these bells sort of become ways to call native laborers back from the field, for example. So in the first one account of native Californians from mission Dolores in San Francisco being sent out to the Presidio, which is miles away to work and being called back by the bells. So in the sort of rural landscape of mission area California, those bells reach huge areas sometimes depending on hills and and topography. So it would become not just this sort of secret sound, but they're also really important in influencing a change in the temporal rhythms of native Californians. So when Sarah peels that bell, he he drowns out all of the all of the other environmental sounds. This becomes the dominant sounds, right. The bells are part of the of this performative apparatus, which is you, which is prescribed as an instrument of all inspiring all right, inspiring interest among the Indians, among the indigenous people of the Americas. And the mission, the bell becomes an instrument of conditioning because the bell wakes you up, the bell brings you to an morning mass, breakfast dinner supper, it regulates every aspect of your life. It intervenes into that environments, which had never heard that sound before and destroy what you had known before. What did it mean to dream that bell and you know, should that cano, you know, it's a it's a it's it's I bet some of these sounds would be hunting the people who heard them for the rest of their lives. You're listening to challenging colonialism, a podcast focused on disrupting the colonial narratives to commonly repeated and accepted in California's history. Please look for our next episode where you'll hear indigenous voices speaking about shellmounds, some of the most numerous archaeological sites sacred sites in California and especially in the Bay Area, which is the unceded territory of a variety of tribal bands together referred to today as a loony people. As we close our first episode, we'll highlight the campaign to remove the mission bells as pseudo historical symbols celebrating genocide. You'll hear the voices of Julissa Lopez, Valentin Lopez, Will Parrish and Alexi Segona. In 2019, a replica bell was taken down on the UC Santa Cruz campus after tribal leaders campaigned for its removal. You can see video of the removal and several of the speakers, including Julissa Lopez and Valentin Lopez with a simple internet search. Later another bell was removed from Santa Cruz mission itself as protesters connected the legacies of colonialism to the legacies of anti-black racism and present day police violence. This direct action removal took place in the spring of 2020, as protests erupted after the deaths of Amad Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd among others. We encourage you to learn more about the effort to remove these bells, not as an effort to erase history but to correct it as these bells are just early 1900s replicas meant to boost tourism and not historical markers in any way. In some ways they are the California equivalent of statues honoring the Confederacy. As we record this in July 2021, another bell removal is planned for August. So my name is Julissa Lopez. I'm a member of the Amamutes and Tribal Band and I'm also Mexican American and I'm currently a grad student at the University of Michigan. I'm getting my PhD in social psychology. I mean, so I was a undergraduate at the University of California Santa Cruz and I didn't really notice them growing up on the highways until I got older and I started driving myself. And then I started seeing them and then I finally saw one like a close and personal on campus. I would walk by it like pretty often because it was on my route to my job. I knew what like there was intention behind it too that it was supposed to be reminding us of the mission period. But I think what it brings up for people is different depending on who the audience is. So for me as a native person, it was a reminder of colonization of, okay, this is a symbol of like the intergenerational trauma that I see every day in my life. And I was also doing a lot of growing in my own identity during undergrad so then having that to confront as I'm on my way to the American Indian Resource Center where I worked, I was just like constantly unpacking my own identity and my people's history. So that was just kind of like another trigger, I guess you can think of it that way. It would just be like, okay, now I have to re-confront this history again because it's not only like a symbol of the times, but it's also a symbol of like what are society values and you know money went into these to recreate them to use them like they weren't left by the Spaniards like California as a state put money into it to create these. Not only that, but when they like were damaged and like ruined early on like they kept putting in money to restore them or to bring them back into kind of develop like I was doing research, CalTrans got $2 million in grants recently like within the 2000s to restore them. And I wanted money that they're putting towards this you know as an effort to like keep these going just for symbolism for tourism. But if that $2 million was invested somewhere else. We started an effort to remove those bells. We found a little acceptance in the UC Santa Cruz campus. I don't know what the heck there was a mission bell on the campus of UC Santa Cruz for. We went up when we talked to the people that you see Santa Cruz about having that bell removed and after we talked about the history of what it represented to Native American people, they agreed to remove that bell. And so we worked with the vice chancellor there to have that bell removed and the bell was removed in 2019. We just took it upon ourselves like we're like we don't like this so we're going to try to do something about it. We were in a position to like be in conversation with administrators that actually could make a difference. So then we made a petition and we were collecting signatures. We had connections in different like organizations on campus and also like other students and resource centers. And so taking that bell down was just a sign that says you're not going to do that anymore. Our ancestors were important. That mission history is not true. You know, there's a lot of other messages of when with that. On the day that bell was removed a lot of speakers said a lot of powerful things. And that is, you know, and it's time for that history to change. Just being able to see it physically be taken down, I think was just healing in itself to be there with like elders, my cousins. It does feel like a dominant effect. It feels like, okay, we can make this, we can remove this bell. Okay, what about the next bell? My name is Will Paris. I am a zero-year community organizer and PhD student in history of process work for the University of California Santa Cruz. And I was in attendance during two different bell removal that affected in Santa Cruz. You know, there was a really nice ceremony and gathering that was seen by the university, you know, the product post. A lot of organizing and really should be building between the animal and the child with animals and it's a portal and the IDC, the administrators after a ceremony, then those speeches and swear and dancing. For me, unfortunately, the U.C. Center is actually that out some tools and removed one of the mission bells that had stood at the U.C. Center for a number of years. I do think the idea definitely contributes to what happened with the removal of the second bell. What I witnessed there basically, but now during the time of the George Floyd uprising and the late spring or the summer last year, there was a moment where a lot of statues were being taken down, representing the way this colonial history of the United States were being removed during direct actions. You know, basically people took it into their own hands to remove things like, you know, statues of fathers in the Cora Cera and Confederate monuments and different parts of the Jim Crow South. And so, you know, it's been a time that some people had bothered for a march and a rally that went to the mission in Santeries and different people spoke there. I'm one of the people who actually spoke during the rally and just shared, like, you know, based on my research, some history. And then, you know, after that, some people took down a bell and was not, like, physically proximate to it enough to see what happened there. But I do know that a bell came down to this phase. During the time when these first events were happening all over the country and different parts of the world, I think that there are some people in Santeries. It made a connection between the submission bellings, the specific histories of genocide, slavery, and incarceration of indigenous people and decided to take action. Yeah, that's my understanding. So, you know, so I think that people recognize the symbolism of bell removal now because it was happened. And so, yeah, I do think it case momentum potentially to get rid of all of them. I'm not sure exactly what it would look like, but I think that now it is an open question. So I think people are focusing on more. And so that gives me a lot of hope that there will be many more bell removal than hopefully all of them will come down sooner than later. Mishmin Treyis, Conraka Alexi Segona. My name is Alexi and I'm a member of the Amamutun Tribal Band. And I'm also one of the leaders of the Amamutun Youth Group for young adult tribal members. Hopefully, removing bells one by one can get people to question the other bells that they're saying and help undermine this false history and false narrative. By removing bells and by removing all of these legacies of the mission system, there's new opportunities for indigenous peoples and indigenous values to be re-inscribed onto the landscapes. So imagine hearing the same sets of things day in and day out for generations here in this landscape. And then it being drowned out by these bells, perhaps instead of hearing bells, we're keel the sounds of mountain lions because we're restoring the ecosystem. Thank you for listening to our first episode. Challenging colonialism is produced by myself, Martin Rismartinus, the historian, and Daniel Stoneblum, a public school administrator. We want to be both accountable and transparent about what our role is and what it is not. It is not our intention to further colonize the narrative or to misrepresent stories that aren't our own. Our own perspectives are unimportant, but we'd like to hear yours. Please leave your feedback, suggestions, reviews, ideas for future episodes, and more at the episode page. And please share and promote the podcast and your networks. The title of today's episode comes from the work of Jaguar Velo Rovics, who used the term instruments of colonization in his piece, California Mission Bells, listening against the fantasy heritage. Published in 2016, Beyond Philology, interviews were recorded by Martin Rismartinus and Alexi Segona. Music in this episode was created by Bernard Gordillo and Hilsson Parker. What follows is a preview of our next episode focused on shalmounds in the Bay Area. Karina Gould speaks about the Emoryville shalmound, a sacred site, leveled in the 20s, used as a toxic waste dump until the 90s, and paved over for a mall in the 2000s. Jorge Tujíca, Atlasshanka, Cáratra, Atkarina. Good day. My name is Karina Gould. I am the spokesperson and tribal chair for the confederated villages of La Shant. At that same time, the Emoryville shalmound was being destroyed for a third time, I say. And the Emoryville shalmound was the largest of the 425 shalmounds on Nelson's 1909 map. Shalmounds that ring the entire Bay Area. Shalmounds where our ancestral burial places, our cemeteries, our village sites, our ceremonial places. And so our ancestors, you know, were not. I'll go through a little bit a little more and then I'll come back to that. So we got called onto the Emoryville mall site because some carpenters began to knew that. or people that were in the Carpenters' Union knew that there were bodies that were being dug up. And then we found out about what was happening there. We found out that they were removing them. But there was also a toxic site, right? Before EPA laws, there were factories that were built there and people would dump stuff into the ground. And it would seep into the Temescal Creek and every time it would rain, it would create this big brown blob into our Bay, which is part of the reason we can't live sustainably in our Bay anymore because it's so polluted. And the City of Emoryville, who was broke at the time, got this huge grant from the federal government to clean up this brown field. And they decided to put a green mall on top of it. And so this green mall destroyed much of what was left of our Shalmound that was there. They found hundreds of bodies. And many of them, they couldn't take out of, they ended up in a toxic waste dump because they were just filled with these toxins. And we went there in protest. We went to city council meetings asking them to not create this mall, to clean it up and allow it to be an open space so that we can talk about not just the past but the resiliency of our people. And the City of Emoryville said, no, they had what I call Ken and Barbie, meeting us outside in the lobby of the city council meetings, asking us what we would like. And basically, how could they pay us off to allow, to shut up so that they could go through with this? For 20 years now, the day after Thanksgiving on the corner of Shalmound Street in a loony way, we show up at this little model mound that's supposed to represent thousands of years of my ancestors being there. And we protest with hundreds of people, of all walks of life holding up signs, giving out information, telling people where they're shopping as a burial site so that this kind of thing would never have to happen again. 2021, the same thing is happening in the Bay Area. You can see cranes in the sky everywhere. And we're not talking about the birds, right? But there's still finding our Shalmounds. So we started doing this campaign because no one knows about Shalmounds in the Bay Area. Allownie people are taught about in 4th grade, you know, most California Indian people are taught about in 4th grade. And then you're not talked about anymore. You're erased from history. You're taught about like you're in the past. And then what I call a white paper genocide, you're not talking about ever again.