JUNIPERO SERRA: SAINT?

STATUE OF SERRA

In seminary we passed around a little comic book that joked about Jesus in the days of the transition from Judaism.  In one of them, the spoof was of Jewish mothers who dote on their sons, expecting them to top the other sons by becoming brain surgeons, thus bringing honor on their mothers.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, is saying to a neighbor, “Have you met my son, the Messiah?”  Beat that!

In Blackfeet culture the favorite child is called a “minipoka.”  It might be a father who makes a pet of a daughter, giving her special privileges and gifts and keeping her close by.  The dark side is that if the father is grieving, the daughter is expected to cut off her fingertips to show the pain of the loss.  The father needs his fingers for his bow.  She is an extension, a plaything but also a ritual object.

There is a “trope” -- a sort of cross-cultural metaphor -- about the “golden child,” the special one who is supposed to be the oldest, the inheritor, the head of the next generation who is an extension of his own patriarch.  It can be a burden, but this sustains the tribe or kingdom in the beliefs and practices that kept them strong.  But times change.  When they do, the stories then are about someone like Joseph, the youngest, different than the others, better able to survive.  Still he comes to the cultural apex of inheritance.

“Boys” are meant to become institutional and generational heads because inheritance is the key to continuity.  The boy is an extension of the father and the genetic line of fathers in a society that is built on ownership and conflict.  Watch “Wolf Hall” which is about breaking two cultural keys:  the Papa who gets to certify “legitimate” boys and the gender of the child who may inherit.    These are at the same time products of and causes of chaos.

JUNIPERO SERRA -- different sculptor

This means that patriarchy commands men to have sons and pass their power on to them while drawing as much preservation from sons as possible, imposing the terms of the father.  This is psychologically enforced by bonding between father and son, which can become a fusion of identity, and can also become a metaphor for an institution.  The Father and the Son and the -- oh, well, she’s just a ghost.  What’s important is the accumulation of assets and territory.

Thus Junipero Serra Ferrer, O.F.M., becomes an obligation for Pope Francis -- who took the name of his order (a fusion of identity) when he became the Papa.  Father Junipero must be sanctified because of his institutional achievements, not because of his compassion or intellectual brilliance, though he earned a doctorate in theology and was considered highly gifted.  Rather he was trying to “make them be like us,” so his statue shows him with a naked indigenous boy, a “son,” but one born outside the marriage or physical inheritance so that there is no incest taboo, but rather a suppressed erotic element that can easily corrupt fusion between mismatched identities.   As we know all too well. 

JUNIPERO SERRA -- a third sculptor

The obligation to understand and protect an “Other” is missing. Junipero indulged in self-torture: pounding himself with a stone, whipping himself, burning himself.   It sounds like a possible effort to suppress or displace the erotic, though it is defined by biographers as penance.  For what?

An early conquest came without war when King Carlos replaced the Jesuits with the Franciscans, so that Junipero’s official title was “Father Presidente.”  He went up the coast of California for the purpose of establishing missions but also to prevent Russians from claiming the territory.  He was also in conflict with local secular Spanish authorities.  These do not sound like tasks for a gentle person.

Today his sanctification is opposed by indigenous people on three grounds: that he punished the people harshly, that he used them as slave labor for the missions, and that he crushed their own culture, doing personal damage to their survival that has lasted until now.  This is formally called “enslavement theology.”

Still a mismatch.

Quoting Wikipedia writers:  “Serra's own views are documented. In 1780, Serra wrote: "that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.” Serra pushed for a system of laws to protect natives from some abuses by Spanish soldiers, whose practices were in conflict with his.”  The use of theology to justify oppression is in conflict with the use of military reasons to do the same thing.  Theology always claims superiority.  That’s its essence.  Theology is power lodged in the Theos, who is Papa.

It is high irony that his statue in the Washington, D.C., Statuary Hall is going to be sent back to California, replaced by Sally Ride!  Each state gets only two statues.  (One of Montana’s is Charlie Russell.)  The other California statue is of Ronald Reagan.  Consider the current anecdote going around is RR greeting a guest by saying,  “My name is Ronald Reagan!  What’s yours?”  The guest is his son, visiting him in the dementia ward.  God also forgets his sons, eh?  Theos Dementia.

Another quote:  “When the Kumeyaay sacked the San Diego Mission in 1775 — killing three Spaniards — the viceroy captured about a dozen Indians and called for their execution, said Gregory Orfalea, who wrote a biography of Serra. But Serra called for the prisoners' release and pleaded their case to the viceroy in a letter: "As to the killer, let him live so that he can be saved, for that is the purpose of our coming here and its sole justification.”

That sounds a little naive, but remember that in California right into the 20^th century the locals shot Indians on sight.  Ishi, the last indigenous tribal man, was in California.  On the other hand, conversions of the Indian people only amounted to about a fifth or fourth of the people.  Meanwhile the sheep and cattle of the missions and others destroyed the economy and starved people because their traditional foods were destroyed.  Then there was the disease. . .  And the industrialization of railroads and gold mining.  

Father Serra didn’t do those things.  But somehow a fully enrobed man waving a cross the shape of a reverse sword with his hand on the shoulder of a small naked Indian boy who is looking away is disturbing in its inequity.

Is the hand on the boy one of support or restraint?  Does even the man know?

This is a 1907 gathering of the patrons who helped pay for this statue of Serra.  They have come to dedicate it, and since the Indian boy has been left out of this portrait, 

they have brought their own sons, but they are not Indians.

This is Bob Scriver's echoing bronze, "Transition", just to make a contrast.  These people posed for their portraits: Chewing Black Bone, Mae Williamson, but the boy's name has been lost.  He is dressed for school in "white-man clothes", carrying his book.  Mae Williamson was an official interpreter.  Her dress is sewn with dozens of elk teeth and was acquired by Father Schoenberg in the Sixties.  He's dead and his museum is razed. 

 I don't know where the dress is now.