Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

stocks, flogging, whatever the padre or soldiers
dictated. They did not go back to the mission.
Wherever they went and however they got there,
those Indians were free.
And that’s as much a miracle as any birth, or
rebirth. That’s a story worth telling, worth
remembering, worth yearning towards one hundred
years or more later.
When my kids were little, I used to tell them I was
the Queen of California, and that the most beautiful
places of all—Carmel, Big Sur, Monterey—were our
homeland. The bitter truth always was, and still is,
that after missionization, the Ohlone/Costanoan-
Esselen people ended up with no land at all. A few
families managed to hang on to a house here, an acre
there, for a little while. It wasn’t until recently that I
learned some of our ancestors actually had been
granted land after secularization, actually owned and
worked a rancho of their own in the Carmel area.
Who were these ancestors, I wondered, and what
happened to them, and to their land?
Cholom was baptized “Fructuoso de Jesús” at San
Carlos on January 21, 1785, the day after his birth, by