How did Native Americans in California interact with Spaniards in the late 1700’s?
| Indian | Village | Mission | Spaniard | Camp |
| 43 | 38 | 35 | 3 | 13 |
Were all interactions perceived as negative by the Spaniards?
| Fight | Good | Help | Kill | Friend |
| 1 | 20 | 1 | 3 | 5 |
The document I found was An Historical, Political, and Natural Description of California, a journal by Pedro Fages who was a Spaniard exploring California in the late 1700s and translated to English by Herbert I. Priestly in 1919. It is quite an interesting read coming from the perspective of an “invader”, describing the people in a very negative light due to their appearance and dislike of the Spaniards. Some limitations I came across with this exercise are the language used (translated from Spanish to English), the search terms I used, and diversity of the tribes in the state. They were not exclusively viewed as hostile and Fages was relatively objective in his notes about each group of people. Some are “warlike” (p. 82), some tribes “manufactures…are more finished and artistic than those of the mission of San Gabriel” (p. 75), and one was “a village of nomads who were very poor”.
Connecting this to the education I had about local indigenous tribes when I was a child, it is quite similar, though more detailed. However, we didn’t learn much about how the Spaniards treated the native populations, maybe due to us being “American” and distinctly separate from Latin American, who were more heavily affected by the Spaniard conquest. We learned a bit about the missions in the area, and the tribes in the area, but never about how the two interacted with each other as the focus was more along the lines of how white settlers interacted with the native tribes.
Reference
Fages, D. P. (1919). An historical, political, and natural description of California (H. I. Priestley, Trans.). The Catholic Historical Review, 5(1), 71–90. Catholic University of America Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25011620