With the Twitter exodus of late I seem to have acquired a hefty number of new followers for this newsletter, the last edition of which went out… almost a year ago. I’m writing another book at the moment on top of teaching an increased course load to larger than usual classes, so you’re not going to start getting these on any kind of regular basis. I’m also never going to charge because I have a job and I get paid to freelance, and my ethics are such that I’d rather you direct your money toward someone who really needs it. Finally, at max I think I have sent these out every month or every two months, so breathe easy. This is a low commitment relationship.
What I have not mentioned in this newsletter is that for the past year, I’ve been writing a column. This was a longtime writing goal of mine, and I’m so grateful to Brett Krutzch at NYU’s The Revealer for suggesting it. It’s called Not So Sorry and each installment explores issues of forgiveness from a religious/social/cultural perspective. You can read all four installments at this link (no paywall!). Not coincidentally, this is also the topic of my next book, tentatively titled Not So Sorry: The Limits of Forgiveness and forthcoming in 2024 (I think).
For quite a while now I’ve been covering issues of clergy abuse as a journalist, which led me to think about the inherent problems of abusive people asking to be forgiven. When the #MeToo thing started, this just pushed the question further to the forefront of my thinking. What does it mean when someone asks to be forgiven, and is it really that bad to refuse to do this? It’s been fascinating, infuriating, and even edifying to look at how this has played out historically and recently. I’m once again working with the wonderful editor Lil Copan and the team at Broadleaf Books who did such a great job with The Defiant Middle (which, btw, is now available as an audiobook… not read by me, thank God).
Here’s a bit from my newest column, which will also appear in the book, just in time to ruin your Thanksgiving plans. Thanks for being here.
California’s oldest standing buildings are the Missions, which were overseen by an ambitious Spanish Franciscan friar named Junipero Serra. Serra, who arrived in Baja California in the late 1760s, had a singular goal: to convert as many of the seemingly recalcitrant Native Californian people as humanly possible. Considering how many Native people ran away from missionaries, they weren’t so much recalcitrant as terrified. One indigenous family seeking help for their sick infant once brought the baby to Serra, who assumed they wanted it baptized, and then fled when it looked like Serra was about to drown their child.
As Serra slowly made his way up California, building missions as he went, more and more Native Californians converted to Christianity. But once they converted, rather than finding salvation, life often became desperate and unpleasant. Not allowed to leave the missions, they were separated from family members, stripped of their languages, rituals, and cultures, and forced to labor for the church. Disease and hunger were rampant. Missionaries beat, whipped, and treated Native Californians with a condescending, infantilizing attitude.
(Mission Santa Clara in California)
By the time I was born, California’s population had been reshaped many times over. Oakland, where I grew up, had gone from a city of Italian and Irish immigrants in the early 20th century to a city with more than 50% Black population during the Great Migration. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America began to pour into California in the 1970s and 80s alongside people from Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa. But there were always Native Californians, too. It’s just that, thanks to Serra, not many of them remained.
Our teachers, with a mind toward building a more diverse story of California, took us on field trips to see the Miwok Village at Point Reyes National Seashore alongside tours of missions. But for people who grew up in the 1980s and later, instead of hearing stories praising Serra, we began to hear other stories: of disease and death, of cultures wiped out, of people who had once been rich in land now homeless. We learned that some things are unforgivable.
Among those stories, one has stuck with me for fifty years as an example of what it means to decimate a group of people so utterly that there is no possibility of forgiveness. It has also defined both what it means to commit an unforgivable act, and how that act can have repercussions for generations.
On August 29, 1911, a starving Native man wandered into Oroville, California, where he was sent to the town jail. He was Yahi, a tribe that had been deliberately and violently massacred by white settlers. In the 1840s, there were approximately 400 Yahi living in Northern California. By 1911, there was one.
Desperate to get rid of this unwanted man, the town reached out to the University of California Museum of Anthropology, which was at that time located in San Francisco, seeking help for the visitor whose name was unknown. Alfred Kroeber, who ran the museum, proposed that the man be moved into the museum to live rather than repatriated to a reservation in Oklahoma. Because it was a Yahi custom not to speak his name to outsiders, Kroeber began calling him Ishi, meaning “man.” Ishi suffered from numerous health problems in the museum, where he lived for four and a half years. In one of the first photographs taken of Ishi, he is thin, covered in what looks like a loaned coat, and barefoot. The anthropologist James Clifford writes that this image, widely circulated when Ishi was “discovered,” was the beginning of Ishi’s story being stolen from him. “Stripped of any context, he is pure artifact, available for collection; pure victim, ready to be rescued.”
Kroeber considered Ishi a friend, and he and other UC anthropologists tried to learn Ishi’s language and customs, hoping to preserve them. But their methodology was, by today’s standards, dehumanizing. Ishi was advertised as “the last wild Indian in California,” and essentially put on display in the museum, where he would carve obsidian arrowheads and sing Yahi songs for crowds of tourists. Against his will, Ishi traveled with Kroeber to the site where his family was massacred to help Kroeber document Yahi life. Ishi’s narrative became Kroeber’s narrative, and Kroeber’s growing fame became dependent on Ishi.
(A photo of Ishi. Source: California Museum)
Ishi struggled in the museum, partly because he was surrounded by the remains of other Native Californians, and partly because he was not accustomed to living indoors or wearing Western clothing. He would sometimes be sighted hunting on nearby Mount Parnassus, but for the most part, he was confined indoors and forced to be a living exhibit. By many accounts, he was friendly, but one can only imagine what he went through psychologically spending nights surrounded by the bones of massacred relatives.
When tuberculosis swept through San Francisco in 1916, Ishi contracted it, probably from a curious museum visitor eager to see a live “wild Indian.” When he died, Kroeber initially opposed letting Ishi’s body be autopsied, but later agreed to have Ishi’s brain sent to the Smithsonian, where it remained until 2020.
By then, narratives about Ishi’s life had changed. Kroeber’s wife Theodora, also an anthropologist who studied Native Americans, wrote what was for many years considered the definitive book about Ishi’s life, Ishi in Two Worlds. But it was an imperfect book in many ways.
As a child, like many Californians, I was assigned a young reader’s version of Theodora Kroeber’s book in school, so the Ishi I knew was the Kroeber’s Ishi, not the Ishi who belongs to the Native Californians who would later spend decades fighting to reclaim his brain so they could lay it to rest with his ashes. Among the mythological stories the Kroebers created is that Ishi was the “last” Indian living wild in California, which is clearly not true: while Ishi’s tribe was wiped out, the descendants of many of the Indians who ran from Serra still live there today.
Even while it acknowledged the genocide of Native Americans and grappled with the trauma Ishi experienced when his family was massacred, Theodora Kroeber’s book also contributed to the mythology of the “healed” Native American. She created a narrative of a person who has been tortured but still manages to be able to move past pain and into forgiveness. Kroeber divides her book into two sections, “The Terror” for Ishi’s life before he arrived at the museum, and “The Healing” once he got there.
But the truth is much more complicated. Ishi will never be able to tell us if he forgave the people who slaughtered his family, if he forgave the seemingly well-meaning white anthropologists who placed him in a museum and exploited his story, or if he forgave Serra and gold prospectors and everyone else who has tried to reinvent California in their own image. Ishi will not even be able to tell us his real name, because it could only be spoken by another Yahi, and they are gone. The remains of Native people that so bothered Ishi when he lived at the Museum of Anthropology were moved along with the rest of the museum to the UC Berkeley campus soon after Ishi died. Thousands of students, faculty, and staff sit in classrooms and offices built over containers of those remains.
In 2015, despite protests from Native Americans, Pope Francis canonized Junipero Serra in Washington, D.C. The pope described Serra as “excited” to learn Native customs and ways of life. But Native Americans disagreed. Five years later, as statues of Confederate generals, Christopher Columbus, and other disgraced historical figures were being toppled across the country in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Native activists knocked down a thirty-foot-tall statue of Serra in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Statues of Serra soon fell in Sacramento and Los Angeles as well. California governor Gavin Newsom had delivered a formal apology to California Native people in 2019, recognizing the history of genocide in the state. But for Native activist Morning Star Gali, “an apology is nothing without action,” and for her and other California Native people, statues of Serra were a reminder of a painful past and needed to go.
(Statue of Serra. Image source: Jaime Reina for Getty Images)
The Catholic Church disagreed. San Francisco archbishop Salvatore Cordileone did not apologize to Native activists for the damage the church had done to them throughout history. Instead, he called the activists a “mob,” accused them of “an act of sacrilege,” and called toppling the statue blasphemy. Cordileone performed an exorcism at the site of the statue, with his own film crew on hand, documenting the ceremony on YouTube, saying “evil has been done here” and calling Serra a hero. The statue, depicting Serra thrusting a cross forward with his arms spread wide, now dented and splattered with red paint, has been put in storage. The California legislature voted to replace it with a statue honoring Native Californians. To this day, such a statue does not exist.