Sunday, November 5, 2017

Sticking it to the monster Junipero Serra

KTLA.com; Elias Castillo (SFGate); Caitlin Harrington (Hoodline); Editors, Wisdom Quarterly

Rebel Toypurina, America's Joan of Arc, was destroyed at the San Gabriel Mission
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Vandalized Serra (SGPD, 11/3/17)
Police are searching for a person who tried to saw off the head of a  [Native American genocide engineer, rapist, murderer, ethnic cleanser, and recent Catholic saint] Junipero Serra statue and threw red paint on it at the San Gabriel Mission early Friday.
 
The incident occurred about 7:50 am at the church, 428 S. Mission Drive.

[The site was once a Vatican/Spanish concentration camp or "mission" where Los Angeles really began. It is also home of the SG Mission Playhouse, which a few years ago had a play about one of Serra's victims, the Tongva/Kizh superheroine Toypurina.]
 
Rebel Medicine Woman Toypurina (SGP)
San Gabriel Police Department reviewed surveillance video that shows a person climbing on the statue and using an electric saw to try and decapitate it.
 
When that didn’t work, the person poured red-colored paint on the chest of the statue, police said.

Police believe the person is a male, who is about 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighs between 130 and 140 pounds. The person was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, black pants, dark-colored gloves. More

California's concentration camps
Elias Castillo (sfgate.com, Nov. 8, 2004)
I don't even remember being Native American. I'm all better now. Thanks, Saint Serra!
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Tortured, converted, killed California Natives
...they were little more than concentration camps where California's Indians were beaten, whipped, maimed, burned, tortured [raped], and virtually exterminated by the friars [Catholic monks/holy men].
 
The California Indians, as the proposal says, did have a culture, but they never got a chance to contribute it to California.

The Spanish crown decreed in the 1760s that the Indians were to be rounded up, baptized into Christianity, and their culture destroyed. It was the same policy that Spain had followed in eradicating the complex and advanced cultures of the Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs in [neighboring Mesoamerica that Spain and Rome made part of] Latin America.

In 1769, that near-genocidal policy was launched, under the direction of Father Junipero Serra, with the founding of California's first mission [at San Gabriel].
 
One scholar, Robert Archibald, has written that the missions were akin to the "forced movement of black people from Africa to the American South." With the help of Spain's soldiers, the Indians were herded to the sites of the missions. Once there, they became slaves... More

California "missions" were concentration camps
Caitlin Harrington (Hoodline.com, March 20, 2016)
Out of the way tribute statute to Toypurina, California (gabrielenoindians.org)
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Last September, Pope Francis canonized Junípero Serra, the first saint canonized in the United States.

During the mass in Washington D.C., the Pope said of the friar:

“He learned how to bring to birth and nurture God’s life in the faces of everyone he met; he made them his brothers and sisters. Junípero sought to defend the dignity of the native community, to protect it from those who had mistreated and abused it.”

Cross of Thorns author Elias Castillo
But according to journalist and author [and three-time Pulitzer prize-nominated journalist and former reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and Associated Press] Elias Castillo, this couldn't be further from the truth [the Pope was lying and not likely in ignorance].

Castillo calls Serra “a madman” who, blinded by his single-minded goal of saving souls [possessing people], oversaw the enslavement and deaths of thousands of California Indians.

(The California Indians we spoke to for the story preferred that term over "Native American.") In A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions, published last year, Castillo draws on seven years of research to present a scathing history of the mission period between 1769 and 1833 and the subsequent Mexican and American rule.  

[He] discussed his book with indigenous author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz at a January talk entitledThe Destructive Legacy of Junípero Serra and the Mission System...” More

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