A study details the "catastrophic" effect of Christian missions on Native Americans

A fantastic book published in the year 1510 in Seville,

, it narrated the fabulous adventures of a Christian knight through imaginary places like one such California, an earthly paradise inhabited by warrior women covered in gold. When the Spanish conquerors arrived on the west coast of North America in the 16th century, they named the lands California, in memory of that legend of a chivalric book so popular at the time that it even appears in Don Quixote's library. The real California, however, was not populated by Amazons with golden swords, but by indigenous groups defenseless against the new infectious diseases brought by the newcomers. New research has now put figures on the "catastrophic" decline of the original population: before the establishment of the Spanish missions, half of the natives survived beyond the age of 47.After the settlement of the so-called “men of God”, half of the locals died before reaching the age of 22.

The current map of California reveals its origin: San Francisco, San José, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo. After more than two centuries of little progress, the friar Junípero Serra founded the first Spanish mission, that of San Diego, in 1769. The Franciscans spread through the territory with the task of turning the local communities of hunters and gatherers into productive subjects of the Catholic King Charles III. The new study, led by the American anthropologist Brian Codding, has analyzed the mortality records of the Spanish missions themselves, with data on more than 23,000 people, and another 10,000 deaths from prehistoric times. The authors speak of mortality levels similar to those of a "plague" after the establishment of the Spanish from 1769.

The authors speak of levels of mortality similar to those of a "plague" after the establishment of the missionaries

The work, published Monday in the journal

of the US National Academy of Sciences (

), estimates that the local population of 43,285 people fell to 7,800 after the arrival of missionaries to what is now central California. "The number of deaths after the establishment of the Spanish missions was probably much higher, especially if the population at the time of contact is underestimated and if the deaths were not recorded," says Codding, from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. Martha Ortega, historian from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (Mexico), applauds the new study, "serious and very good", in which she has not participated.

Some Spanish historians, such as Salvador Bernabéu, have analyzed the mission system in California in recent years. The friars, accompanied by some soldiers, arrived with dogs, horses, chickens, sheep, seeds and gifts to attract the natives. The preachers taught them Christian prayers, baptized them, and dressed them like Spaniards: men with trousers and shirts, or women with dresses. Bernabéu, director of the School of Hispanic-American Studies (CSIC), has noted in his works the "drastic fall" of the indigenous population due to infectious diseases, a problem that worsened when the natives were forced to live in poorly ventilated rooms in missions. Smallpox, common cold, flu, measles, diphtheria,malaria and venereal diseases ravaged the natives.

Viruses and microbes, however, do not alone explain the catastrophe experienced around the Spanish missions, warn the US authors, pointing to other added factors, such as land expropriation, famines, slavery and forced relocations. . "Perhaps the culprit was the cultural chaos that spread through America after contact with Europeans and that could have radically exacerbated the vulnerability of indigenous populations," the researchers argue in their study. His analysis shows that in the Californian missions, a greater number of women died (about 13,000) than men (about 10,000), a phenomenon still unexplained, according to another of the signers, the prehistorian Terry Jones, of the State Polytechnic University of California, in San Luis Obispo.

“There was violence in the missions. There were attempts of revolt on the part of the natives, ”says Jones, who relies on the analysis of the skeletal remains, with marks of blows and projectiles. “And California was not a violence-free paradise before the arrival of the Spanish. Historical accounts describe small-scale confrontations with violence between native groups, often caused by the unauthorized use of another group's resources or by the invasion of their territories, ”emphasizes Jones.

Historians thought for decades that, after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America in 1492, there was a continental pandemic that wiped out the indigenous population, with plagues that would even have reached California before the Spaniards themselves, but studies such as that of Codding and Rather, Jones show a mosaic of regional epidemics that have arisen over centuries and with different intensities.

The plague in California came with the missionaries.

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