Across the United States, in the weeks following the death of George Floyd, social protests brought renewed scrutiny of statues and monuments in public places in nearly every state, particularly the memorials to Confederate generals, such as Robert E. Lee, or individuals involved in colonizing America, such as Christopher Columbus or Fray Junípero Serra, O.F.M. Citing their historical context as symbols of oppression and violence against marginalized groups, many are calling for these statues to be removed; some have even taken matters into their own hands by toppling statues, or by transforming them into powerful symbols of protest (1). Others argue that these statues should be preserved in their original locations (2), asserting that their removal erases American history, and call for those who destroy or illegally remove statues to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

There’s no doubt that statues are powerful symbols and form part of an historical record. But statues which inspire reverence for some have associated legacies which surface painful historical realities for others.

Founded in 1777 as the 8th of 21 Spanish missions by Franciscan priests during Junípero Serra’s tenure as president of the California missions, Mission Santa Clara included lands consisting of 80,000 acres (3) at its peak in 1832. This land supported the livelihood of 1,400 Franciscans, Spanish troops and settlers, and the Ohlone, the Native Americans indigenous to this part of the Santa Clara Valley that had been acculturated into the Mission. Overall, the burial registers held by Archives & Special Collections record about 7,700 burials, and the majority of those buried were the Ohlone, with Spanish Franciscans, troops, and settlers making up a smaller minority.

Mission Santa Clara was built and flourished by the labor of the Ohlone who acculturated into Mission life, and who tended crops and flocks on lands taken away from the Ohlone who rejected Mission life. And this wasn’t just to preserve scarce resources: at one point Mission Santa Clara produced enough crops and livestock to supply food and other resources to a number of the other missions.

Due to earthquake, flood, and fire damage, Ohlone labor built five of the six church buildings associated with Mission Santa Clara, and hundreds of adobe structures like the Old Adobe Woman’s Club. While many of the other 21 mission churches still stand today, they are largely tourist destinations, with many also still serving as places of religious devotion. At Mission Santa Clara, many SCU faculty, staff, and students, as well as members of the surrounding community attended mass daily, prior to the coronavirus related shelter-in-place order issued in March.

On SCU’s campus and in the Mission church, presently there are numerous statues and memorials which point to, and privilege in places of honor, the numerous groups and individuals associated with the history of colonial Spain, Mission Santa Clara, Santa Clara College, and American California. There are statues of Franciscan priest Junípero Serra, president of the California Missions whom some have referred to as the Columbus of California (4); St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order whose Turin (Italy) Province in 1851 founded and administered Santa Clara College; St. Clare of Assisi, namesake of Mission Santa Clara; St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order; the archangel Michael; the Virgin Mary; Father Magin Catalá, one of a number of Franciscan priests who administered Mission Santa Clara; Eusebio Kino, a 16th century Jesuit missionary to Baja California (now part of Mexico); Sir Thomas More, and probably a dozen or more other statues. Inside the present day Mission church, there are memorial plaques honoring the first governor of California, honoring SCU alumni who served during World War II, and honoring the De Anza expedition whose European members located the original sites of both Mission Santa Clara and the town of San Jose. Few, if any, of these individuals are buried on this campus, much less on this continent.

Among these statues and memorials, however, there is an important group of people who are omitted even though they have lived here for thousands of years: the Ohlone.

The Mission church and the SCU campus are situated on the ancestral homeland of the Ohlone people, who trace their ancestry through the Missions Dolores, Santa Clara, and San Jose. However, nowhere on this campus is there a statue or plaque or any other information to honor and memorialize the Ohlone who lived, thrived, and died in the Bay Area long before the colonization of California, and who supplied the manual labor to both build and run the mission, care for the livestock brought from Spain, and grow and harvest the crops.

The documented descendants of the mission era Ohlone are still alive today, and include present day SCU students. Further, SCU archaeologists have produced documented evidence of the bodies of ancestors of present day Ohlone who are still buried on the grounds of SCU. Some of these remains have been relocated, such as those discovered in 1887 when the College broke ground on a boys’ chapel, and which now likely are present in the gated rose garden cemetery to the right of the Mission Church, or were relocated within the wider present day Church walls when it was rebuilt after the fire of 1926. Other remains are still present in their original locations, which extend beyond the rose garden cemetery to the area between O’Connor Hall and Mayer Theatre.

At any given moment, anyone moving through the area between O’Connor Hall and Mayer Theatre may literally be walking – or skateboarding, or driving a golf cart – over an unmarked grave (5). Here they may also encounter SCU’s Junípero Serra statue, erected in 1997. Readers of this blog who are familiar with the controversy surrounding the 2015 canonization of Serra by Pope Francis know that Serra’s statue is one of those on our campus which both inspires reverence while also surfacing painful historical realities. On the one hand, Serra is considered a founding father of California, a role which earned him a statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall and numerous other statues across the country. On the other hand, the mission system which continued after Serra’s death in 1784, and which dominated indigenous life in Spanish California – at times with violence – undeniably played a critical role in the destruction of native culture and lands, the decimation of native populations, and paved the way for the later dispossession of ancestral native lands at the hands of the post-colonial governments of Mexico and the United States. In the history of settling the West in America, Serra is a heroic figure whose legacy as founder of the California missions has become symbolically associated with colonial oppression and violence.

A little over one year ago, Fr. Michael Engh, S.J., the outgoing SCU president, convened an Ohlone History Working Group whose task is to “provide assistance to the University in deciding on better ways to honor the Ohlone people, including pre-Mission ancestors buried here, those who resided and built the Mission, and their descendants” (6). Their efforts have included research and reflections on fcampus statues and memorials. This summer, after much deliberation, and with input from present day Ohlone tribe members, the Working Group submitted a report with recommendations to the current President of SCU, Father Kevin O’Brien, S.J.

SCU’s efforts are part of a growing effort among colleges and universities across the country to grapple with their histories of benefitting at the expense of disadvantaged populations, including African American slaves as well as Native Americans. Such projects include the following:

• Rutgers University’s, Scarlet and Black Project
• Georgetown University’s Georgetown Slavery Project
• Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
• Columbia University’s research on Columbia University & Slavery
• Harvard University’s Harvard and the Legacy of Slaveryv
• University of Virgina’s President’s Commission on Slavery and the University
• University of Portland’s Land Acknowledgement
• Northwestern University’s Land Acknowledgement
• Colorado State University’s Land Acknowledgement
• Baylor University’s Commission on Historic Campus Representations

Although the Jesuits who founded this University in 1851 are not responsible for the oppression and violence of colonial Spain, the present day Jesuits believe that there is an opportunity for reconciliation and that pursuing reconciliation is the right thing to do. Indeed, for SCU to truly cherish its diverse and inclusive community, one aspect of this campus it must see squarely is whose legacies are privileged, and whose are erased or excluded, through the statues and memorials on campus. In campus conversations, some have proposed removing the Serra statue to the de Saisset Museum’s recently re-opened California exhibit, where historical context can provide a better understanding of Serra’s role in colonialism and that could include perspectives of the Ohlone, past and present. Whether we remove it or leave it where it is, the priority in everyone’s minds is how to honor the Ohlone who lived on this land before Europeans arrived, and how we might make our campus more inclusive for Ohlone visiting today.

Even if the statue is removed, evidence of its existence is elsewhere among hundreds, if not thousands, of records held by Archives & Special Collections. And though we don’t advocate such actions, were the statue to be destroyed by protesters or marred by vandalism, the results are still part of the historical record of that statue and will be documented in the SCU Archives.

Footnotes

1. McCammon, Sarah. “In Richmond, Va., Protesters Transform A Confederate Statue,” June 12, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876124924/in-richmond-va-protestors-transform-a-confederate-statue.
2. Escobar, Allyson. “Controversial Junípero Serra Supported by some Indigenous Catholics, California Mission Workers,” August 11, 2020, https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/controversial-jun-pero-serra-supported-some-indigenous-catholics-california-mission.
3. This 1876 Thompson & West historical atlas map of Santa Clara County shows the land-grant ranchos that resulted after secularization, providing evidence of the vestigial boundaries of the Mission Santa Clara lands. Map courtesy of the Rumsey Map Center at Stanford: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~21649~660012.
4. Gibson, David. “Pope Francis Canonizes, and Defends, Controversial Spanish Missionary Junipero Serra,” September 23, 2015, https://religionnews.com/2015/09/23/pope-francis-canonizes-defends-controversial-spanish-missionary-junipero-serra/.
5. To some extent, these graves are unmarked in keeping with the practices of the Ohlone, or with the wishes of the descendants of those buried here. I acknowledge that it would be worth exploring if and how graves were originally marked, such as with a wooden cross or small headstone, as I have seen at Mission San Jose or at the Mission Cemetery in Santa Clara. In his “A visit to the Mission Santa Clara, school of the Padres, university of today,” Fr. Arthur D. Spearman, S.J. noted that remains in two caskets uncovered in 1928, when the destroyed adobe facade and tower base were razed to lay new foundations, were identified with a brass plates or names spelled in brass studs on the caskets (p. 8). Although Fr. Spearman makes note of a cemetery on the north side of the church, he does not indicate in this document that graves were marked in any way (p. 7).
6. Engh, Michael. [SCU-Staff-Essential] Appointment of the Ohlone History Working Group of Santa Clara University. Received by SCU Staff and SCU Faculty. May 29, 2019, https://libguides.scu.edu/ld.php?content_id=53948625.

Header image of Junípero Serra on SCU’s campus taken by Summer Shetenhelm June 2020.