Lee M. Panich and Gustavo Flores, "We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions" (U Nebraska Press, 2026)

But this history reading the book is clear that it's not just about history.

It has kind of more direct relevance today.

So can we maybe talk about those sorts of interventions and why this history is kind of not just in the past?

Sure.

So if you've, you know, if any of your listeners have been to California or live in California, you cannot escape the presence of the Spanish colonial missions that stretch from San Diego in the south up through the San Francisco Bay Area in the north.

And in pretty much any area of the state that falls into that region, these missions were the first European settlements and they've been celebrated as such.

But when you scratch the surface, these were institutions that were explicitly designed to bring native people into the colonial fold, essentially transform them from seasonally mobile people who stewarded the landscape with fire and other means to turn them essentially into a European peasantry that could be more easily governed.

The first mission in California was founded in 1769 and that history is fairly well known and the implications or the kind of impacts of missionization were really tremendous for a lot of indigenous groups.

And so much so that today in 2026, very few of the tribes whose ancestors were in the missions are recognized by the United States federal government as legitimate American Indian groups.

So in the US, we call this term kind of federal recognition.

And so this is really paramount for a lot of tribes in California who lack federal recognition, largely because of the way government officials and anthropologists had understood the impacts of the missions.

And so that's really a topic that Gustavo and I have both looked at in other projects.

But when we started looking at these documents, one of the things that I found really fascinating was that we see so much evidence of, as Gustavo said, Native agency, people trying to make the best of a bad situation, but pretty late in time.

Typically, when we think about the missions, we think of kind of a catastrophic early impact, kind of a fatal impact model colonialism.

But here, we're looking at documents from the 1830s, 1840s that really tell a different story, and especially in a time period in which Native people have usually been left out of the traditional histories.

So this period from the 1820s onward, California pretty rapidly moved from a Spanish colony to a Mexican one, and then finally to a state of the United States.

And that kind of political history really takes center stage But what we've seen in the documentary record is there's this other story, Native histories in which people leaving the missions really set out to rebuild their communities.

And this story of seeking justice resonates with what we see today in the Bay Area with our Ohlone friends and colleagues.

And that difference in terms of kind of time and sort of when we're expecting to see this story, I suppose, is something that obviously you've explained there, but it's also in the book and it's kind of explicitly talked about in terms of when you start, when chapter one begins.

Can we talk about that decision?

So, the first chapter really starts at about 1810.

And this is an important moment in California history because this is the onset of the Mexican War of Independence.

And so, that's a major turning point in the colonization of the Pacific Coast of California.

And, you know, not coincidentally, it's also the peak of the mission system.

which by that point had been around for about 40 years in California.