In what way was Serra abusive towards native Americans? Did he torture native Americans?
He is representative of the entire mission system, Because he was the leader of the founding of the missions in California. His statue is representative of the whole thing, I don’t really think it’s about Junipero Serra individually.
The missionaries and soldiers came and took the land as they pleased and built these fortified missions.
The native population was put onto the mission lands, largely coercively. They worked the land, did not receive pay, the goods they created and animals/crops they toiled to raise were sold for profits.
They were not allowed to leave and if they tried to leave and return to their Indian villages or way of life, they were forcibly returned, and yes beaten. Children were taken and baptized and then held away from their parents until they too submitted to baptism. They were then sent to the presidios of the soldiers and landowners to be laborers and house servants, also unpaid.
There’s a word for a place you are forced to stay as free labor.
Then after Mexico won independence from Spain, they secularized the missions and sold off the valuable land to wealthy ranchers, leaving the Indians with nothing tangible but two generations of internment and forced labor. And a population decimated by disease.
So some see this statue as a symbol of that whole system.
Fr Serra himself wasn’t not a monster, his heart was in the right place and he was carrying out the mission of Evangelization as he understood it. (although he did believe in and oversee the physical punishment of Indians for various infractions and he did approve of their forced residence at the missions). He has a place both in the religious history of California and in the history of California’s colonization and eventual path to statehood and what it is today. It is of no doubt that the mission system was a vital importance to the development of California.
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of statues are being defaced or pulled down and not all of that is rational. Statues of St Junipero Serra have been defaced before. This is not a new controversy in California. The controversy doesn’t have anything to do with his catholicity, but rather with the controversy of the mission system itself.
