Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

Cabecinhas, R. & Abadia, L. (eds.) (2013)Narratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approachesBraga: University of MinhoISBN: 978-989-8600-04-2pp. 253 -265Colonial Missions in the North AmericanSouthwest: Social Memory and EthnogenesisMariah WadeUniversity of Texas, Austin, USAm.wade@austin.utexas.eduAbstractBetween the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, European Franciscan and Jesuitmissionaries established missions for Native American groups throughout the AmericanSouthwest and modern northern Mexico. The process and methodologies of missionizationimplied radical changes in Native American societies and culture. The impact of suchchanges was different for settled, crop-growing groups than it was for those who werenomadic and made a living gathering and hunting. Equally important was the way thecontact generation and second generation Natives adapted, reacted, or acted on theprocesses of indoctrination and acculturation. Using archival texts, practice theory andconcepts such as structuration and hegemony, this paper explores identity formationand argues for the embeddedness of missionizing practices in ethnogenesis. Practicetheory and concepts such as the habitus and hegemony provide the means to interrogatemissionary texts such as confessionary manuals and catechisms and investigate how theserefashioned social arrangements affected shamanistic practices. Likewise, structuration àla Giddens facilitates an understanding of the way rules, stated and understated, practices,and social relationships were produced and reproduced in individual and collectivesocial interactions between the missionized and the missionaries. As Native peopleswere exposed to the institution of the mission they retained Native habitual practicesand traditions while embedding new routines and practices in repeated social actionsand interactions. Often displaced and culturally diasporic, the generations that emergedout of the colonial mission system, and particularly modern Native groups, were joltedinto contextualizing and reinterpreting their culture in the process of ethnogenesis, anegotiation and articulation of shared meanings and experiences that produces anidentifiable cultural entity whose members feel they belong together. In the case of manymissionized Native American groups that process of identity formation includes a largeCatholic heritage component, which, in some cases, is the key defining element of theexpression of their modern identity.KeywordsColonial missions; American Southwest; Native Americans; ethnogenesisBetween the late 1500s and the early 1800s Jesuits and Franciscan missionaries underthe Crown of Spain established a multitude of Catholic missions from Spanish Florida toCalifornia, a geographical area that encompassed most of the colonial territory of New Spain.Most missions in North America were clustered in Florida, Texas, New Mexico and California,and in some cases both religious orders worked in the same mission field at different times.