Missions history includes reports of brutal behavior

It is commendable that the Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, Archdiocese of San Francisco, chose a peaceful response to the Indigenous Peoples Day removal of Junipero Serra’s statue from its San Rafael church (“San Rafael police: Five arrested in connection with toppling Junipero Serra statue,” Oct. 14).

Itmay be unfortunate that the church was apparently not asked to remove the statue itself, but the official reply implies that the church would have declined anyway. It is deeply troubling — and profoundly insulting to our 16th president — for the archbishop to assert that seeing Serra “as the icon of oppression of the Indians is akin to doing the same with Abraham Lincoln and the institution of slavery in the United States.”

French naval officer and explorer Jean-François de la Pérouse was a devout Catholic observer of the Mission at Monterey in 1786, only two years after Serra’s death. During his scientific voyage around the world, he visited French plantations in the West Indies before visiting Monterey.

According to the California Historical Society Quarterly (“A Visit to Monterey in 1786, and a Description of the Indians of California,” 1996), he saw slave labor.

“(The Monterey mission) brought to our recollections a plantation (in Haiti) or any other West India island,” de la Pérouse wrote. “We have seen both men and women in irons and others in the stocks. ... Corporal punishment is inflicted on the Indians of both sexes who neglect the exercises of piety. ... (Captured escapees were) condemned to receive a certain number of lashes with the whip.”

At a time of official supremacist bigotry against Native Americans from north and south of the border, shouldn’t the archbishop begin amends for the supremacist brutality of the ill-named Franciscan missions?

— Jim Linford, Marinwood