Recovering lost voices and exploring issues intimate and
institutional, this sweeping examination of Spanish California
illuminates Indian struggles against a confining colonial order and
amidst harrowing depopulation. To capture the enormous challenges
Indians confronted, Steven W. Hackel integrates textual and
quantitative sources and weaves together analyses of disease and
depopulation, marriage and sexuality, crime and punishment, and
religious, economic, and political change.
As colonization reduced their numbers and remade California,
Indians congregated in missions, where they forged communities
under Franciscan oversight. Yet missions proved disastrously
unhealthful and coercive, as Franciscans sought control over
Indians' beliefs and instituted unfamiliar systems of labor and
punishment. Even so, remnants of Indian groups still survived when
Mexican officials ended Franciscan rule in the 1830s. Many regained
land and found strength in ancestral cultures that predated the
Spaniards' arrival.
At this study's heart are the dynamic interactions in and around
Mission San Carlos Borromeo between Monterey region Indians (the
Children of Coyote) and Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and
settlers. Hackel places these local developments in the context of
the California mission system and draws comparisons between
California and other areas of the Spanish Borderlands and colonial
America. Concentrating on the experiences of the Costanoan and
Esselen peoples during the colonial period,
Children of
Coyote concludes with an epilogue that carries the story of
their survival to the present day.