One Story of a Mission Santa Clara Indian

Arguably the most famous Mission Indian of Mission Santa Clara, Lope Inigo of Rancho Posolmi is an Ohlone person whose life spanned the Spanish, Mexican, and American colonial period in the Santa Clara Valley, having lived from 1781-1864. Inigo held the relatively high post (available to an Indian) of an alcalde, a magistrate or leader appointed by the missionaries who was “responsible (with the priests, soldiers, and other male Indian leaders) for governing and controlling the Indians at the mission and ensuring that all necessary work was completed” (Shoup and Milliken, 60). The subject of an entire monograph published in 1999 by Shoup and Milliken, Inigo has come to represent the experiences of many faceless Ohlone that underwent captivity and enculturation at Mission Santa Clara because he was “an important Native American and he lived a long life” (xi). This enabled the authors of the book to gather a critical mass of information by doing traditional and innovative archival research on both the life of Inigo and the larger context of the period in which he lived.

One Story That Gets Told in Detail

What do the authors mean by saying that Inigo was an important Native American? When discussing this with students during class visits in the Archives, in the past I would frame the topic by saying we only know so much about Inigo because he was a “successful” Mission Indian that survived through assimilation, as if he was part of a conspiracy to only propagate the stories of Indians who converted and served the colonizers. In reality it is more complex than that. Because of his willingness to assimilate in the Spanish hierarchy, Inigo was able to weather the “array of undesirable choices” (xi) he faced throughout his life, which enabled his longevity, which eventually led to his leaving an impression on the archival record. Shoup and Milliken say, “In borrowing from the Spanish he recreated himself, rejecting much of his ‘Indianness’ in favor of being more like the Spanish. His identification with the Spanish and the colonial system was evidently complete enough that he did not feel the dejection and stress felt by many other Indians who joined the mission at an age older than he had. From the Spanish perspective, he was a success story; he eventually made it to the point of becoming a colonist himself” (69). The privilege of European record keeping and the type of archival sources available for consultation today prize stories like Inigo’s, where traces of his experience are reflected in the official petitions he submitted, priests’ reports from the Mission, and traveler accounts of the area, not to mention more modern publications in the mid to late 19th century like newspapers and maps.

From these sources we know that ultimately Inigo’s years of service to Mission Santa Clara were acknowledged through a land grant after secularization, a rare distinction only given to three groups of Natives, Inigo being one.

It wasn’t easy to secure this land grant. Inigo originally claimed 3,042 acres in an area known as Rancho Posolmi (located at present-day Moffitt Field in Mountain View), as well as livestock and some of his relatives. He had to take up his petition multiple times to multiple Mexican officials and round up help from allies like Fr. Mercado at Mission Santa Clara to receive the formal grant, a process that took at least three years. Finally in Feburary of 1844, Governor Micheltorena granted Rancho Posolmi to Inigo.

During 1844 and 1845, Micheltorena gave at least four other land grants from Mission Santa Clara lands to private parties. Two of these were granted to Indians. These were Los Coches to Roberto in 1844 and Ulistac to Marcelo, Pio, and Cristobal in 1845… Not only did eight of the twelve listed grants (66 percent) go to Californios or allied Anglos, the average size of the four Indian grants was less than half that of the Californio-Anglo group (2,979.25 acres vs. 6,785.5 acres). It should be added that the Indians who received land were all older Ohlone/Costanoan Indians with long and successful service to the Californios and a multitude of ties both with each other (as godparents for each others’ children and witnesses to marriages) and with key members of the Californio power structure, including people like Juan Prado Mesa and members of the Arguello, Berryessa, Higuera, and Peralta families (Shoup and Milliken, 117).

Later, during the late 1840s, the invasion of anglo-American migrants from the East and eventual statehood of California in 1850 led to squatters flowing into the area and claiming land that they believed they had right to. Shoup and Milliken explain:

Inigo had to be alarmed about the squatter situation. He was an Indian with possessions coveted by the invading Anglo-Americans, and he was becoming surrounded by men who hated Indians, many of whom were quite willing to use violence against them. As we have seen from the first part of this study, Inigo grew up and matured as a member of a subordinate race in a semi-slave and semi-feudal system. This experience made him acutely aware of the necessity for patróns, allies against those who would abuse or deny the few rights he had. He has gained his land and possessions only through long service and the patronage of many, including the priests of Mission Santa Clara. Now, as a landowner from an oppressed race during a revolutionary transfer of power, he again had to find a protector from among the new invaders. In the summer of 1849, Inigo found his patrón for the new era in the person of Robert Walkinshaw (129).

Inigo evidently sold part of Rancho Posolmi to Walkinshaw, and together they went through long, protracted court proceedings against the new American government in which they were forced to prove the claim to their land. Against all odds Walkinshaw and Inigo successfully defended the claim, but only for 1,696 of the original 3,042 acres; of these Inigo had 448.2 (the rest were Walkinshaw’s or sold to other partners).

Student Researchers Digging for These Stories

While student researchers at Santa Clara are thirsty for doing the type of research exemplified in Shoup and Milliken’s book, it is difficult to connect them with resources because the field lacks adequate primary sources, and those that do exist are non-Indian. Additionally, many times Inigo’s experience or even existence is not considered worth including in Mexican or American official counts and records. The authors state on the first page of the foreword, “Reconstructing his life, his times, and his relationship to Rancho Posolmi has been a challenge,” and that is a challenge I routinely face in my role as Research & Instruction Services Coordinator here in the SCU Archives.

Part of this challenge is the schism between the official research methods employed by the academy and the ways in which tradition, history, and culture are passed down within Ohlone communities. At the heart of this schism is the colonial attitudes still pervasive in archives (as is the case with the Mission Santa Clara Manuscript Collection we hold at SCU), and the exclusion of Ohlone voices from the archival record. I am ignorant of local communities of Ohlone holding written primary sources related to their ancestors’ or family members’ experiences, and if I was not ignorant of this, there is no saying those materials belong in an institutional archive. The type of trust that is necessary for an outside researcher to create with their Ohlone interlocutors is a trust developed over the lifetime of a career and born from shared goals and fellowship.

But none of this is to say that the colonial, institution-run archives I describe should be gotten rid of; it is to say that bias and authorship are the important learning opportunities I employ when discussing these materials and research methods with students. Without the baptism records from Mission Santa Clara, the authors of Inigo of Rancho Posolmi would not have been able to recreate the genealogy of at least five generations of Inigo’s family or reconstruct the mass of deaths colonialism brought to the Natives, and without the diaries and records created by the Spanish missionaries and explorers, the authors would have put forward even less information about the Native Californian tribelets and villages that existed pre-contact.

Every historian or anthropologist longs for pristine primary sources created by the person or group under study. Lacking those, they interpret the available primary sources to support their argument despite authorship or viewpoint of the primary source. Shoup and Milliken’s authoritative work on Inigo expertly blends deep, thorough research in every written or printed source available to deliver a moving narrative of the realities of Mission Santa Clara, the trials and tribulations of the Native Americans in the vicinity, and the supposition of Inigo’s most personal struggles. My greatest aim in my job is to facilitate the same for the students of Santa Clara University.