The University of North Carolina Press

496 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 33 illus., 7 figs., 38 tables, 4 maps, appends., glossary, chronology, notes, index

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, VA

Cloth

ISBN  978-0-8078-2988-9

Published: October 2005

Paper

ISBN  978-0-8078-5654-3

Published: October 2005

Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis

Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850

By Steven W. Hackel

2007 W. Turrentine Jackson Award, Western History Association
2006 Norman Neuerburg Award, Historical Society of Southern California
2006 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, American Society for Ethnohistory
2006 James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
2006 Hubert Herring Book Award, Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies

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.

About the Author

Steven W. Hackel is associate professor of history at the University of California Riverside.