american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 139food provided the Indians was grossly insufficient, especially, said one,given "the arduous strain of the labors in which they are employed"; labors,said another, which last "from morning to night"; and labors, noteda third, which are added to the other "hardships to which they are subjected."148 Caloric intake, of course, is but one part of the requirement fora sufficient diet. The other part is nutritional value. And the most thoroughstudy of the composition of the mission Indians' diets reveals themto have been seriously deficient in high-quality protein, and in Vitamins Aand C, and riboflavin. 149 The resulting severe malnutrition, of course, madethe natives all the more susceptible to the bacterial and viral infectionsthat festered in the filthy and cramped living conditions they were forcedto endure-just as it made them more likely to behave lethargically, somethingthat would bring more corporal punishment down upon them. Notsurprisingly, osteological analyses of California mission Indian skeletal remains,compared with those of Indians who lived in the same regions priorto European contact, show the long bones of the mission Indians to be"significantly smaller than those of their prehistoric and protohistoric predecessors,"leading to the conclusion that such differences "reflect retardedgrowth, possibly attributable to the nutritional deficiency of the missiondiet or the combined effects of poor nutrition and infectious disease." 150When not working directly under the mission fathers' charge, the captivenatives were subject to forced labor through hiring-out arrangementsthe missions had with Spanish military encampments. The only compensationthe natives received for this, as for all their heavy daily labors, wasthe usual inadequate allotment of food. As one French visitor commentedin the early nineteenth century, after inspecting life in the missions, therelationship between the priest and his flock "would . . . be different onlyin name if a slaveholder kept them for labor and rented them out at will;he too would feed them." But, we now know, he would have fed thembetter. 151In short, the Franciscans simultaneously starved and worked their wouldbeconverts to death, while the diseases they and others had imported killedoff thousands more. The similarity of this outcome to what had obtainedin the slave labor camps of Central and South America should not besurprising, since California's Spanish missions, established by Father JuniperoSerra (aptly dubbed "the last conquistador" by one admiring biographerand currently a candidate for Catholic sainthood), were directlymodeled on the genocidal encomienda system that had driven many millionsof native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizingdeaths. 152Others died even more quickly, not only from disease, but from grotesqueforms of punishment. To be certain that the Indians were spirituallyprepared to die when their appointed and rapidly approaching time came,they were required to attend mass in chapels where, according to one mis-