Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 131
doing so will require upsetting the well-worn narrative of “American Catholic
exceptionalism,” which has framed the Church’s history for a half-century.
Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-
Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005. Pp. xx + 476. $59.95/$24.95.
Reviewed by Richard W. Pointer, Westmont College
The story of California’s missions and their impact on native peoples has been told many
times but rarely with the skill and rigor Steven Hackel has brought to the task. Along
with James Sandos’s recent Converting California (2004), Children of Coyote,
Missionaries of Saint Francis raises the quality of scholarship on early California to a
new level. Essential to that achievement is, on the one hand, a creative and exhaustive use
of archival materials, both textual and quantitative, and on the other hand, a compelling
central thesis. Investigating both the particular experience of Monterey region Indians
(the Children of Coyote) at Mission San Carlos Borromeo, and the broader record of the
twenty-one Catholic missions as a whole, Hackel argues that dual revolutions of
ecological change and demographic collapse profoundly shaped not only the course of
Indian-Spanish relations but the viability of native communities and the Euro-American
missionary enterprise. As the Spanish established missions and military outposts
(presidios) along the California coast after 1769, they brought with them alien microbes,
plants, and animals. As European diseases began to spread, so, too, did inadvertently
transported Old World weeds and plants, gradually displacing native ones. Meanwhile,
newly arrived Spanish livestock feasted on Alta California’s fertile grasslands, producing
an “animal population explosion” (69) that soon overran Indian lands and villages.
Together these environmental changes, however unintentionally, created a subsistence
crisis among California Indians. Many of the most vulnerable natives—the young, the
old, and unmarried women—began to seek refuge at the recently established missions,
because the missions were starting to become agriculturally productive operations where
adequate food could be had. The more natives who congregated at the missions in the
late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the more difficult it became for nonmission
Indians to maintain themselves and their communities apart from the missions’
orbit. So the missions succeeded in attracting most coastal natives to their confines,
though Indians were more pushed than drawn there by their economic and demographic
circumstances. Natives came to places such as San Carlos Borromeo with hopes of
physical survival and community and cultural maintenance. In the long run, however,
those goals proved mostly illusory, given the demographic disaster that befell them at the
missions. After a few decades of population increase due to the influx of surrounding