The War Against Memory

a red paper

The war against memory

A RED PAPER

The War Against Memory

Excerpted from a Presentation at Disrobing Junipero Serra – Saint or Monster?

Coordinated by the Barbareño Chumash Tribal Council “’Iyalmuwič” and The American Indian Movement of Southern California, May 30, 2015 in the homelands of the Chumash People, Sunqcuu

This educational project is published by Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples, Inc. P.O. Box 4569 Arcata, CA 95518

- 09.23.15 -

Written by: Tia Oros Peters, M.F.A. Executive Director Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples

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Thank you to the Indigenous Peoples of this land, the Chumash, for the generosity offered to each of us with their opening words and songs; for their gracious welcome of everyone onto their traditional territories, and to their ancestors. We meet together here in this ancient and all knowing region, here in Sunqcuu, a place that many also know as Santa Barbara … For me today, we are in Sunqcuu, in the deepest sense because we are speaking about critical matters that reach into the very core of the Chumash, and of the so many Indigenous Peoples’ worlds, memories, and spirits.

Although today we may be in what some know as the Unitarian Church building in Santa Barbara, California, truly, wherever we are in this area now known as Santa Barbara, whether reaching north and south, reaching east and west, or reaching across the channel to the islands -- we are within the embrace of Chumash homelands.

Today we have the individual and collective task to talk and share about some really hard, wrenching issues. These are challenging issues of contemporary time that were first triggered hundreds of years ago externally first, and which now vibrate within us. These evoke tremendous pain and they span centuries and generations and geographies of experience, of thought, of memory, and of consciousness. These are what generate dreams and which fuel forever nightmares.

Our moderator and guide for this first panel today, Marcus Lopez, Sr., of the Barbareño Chumash Tribal Council, mentioned that we are creating history in this dialogue today, and in these activities over this weekend that will culminate in ceremony at the gravesites behind the “Queen of Missions” here in Suncquu, where so many have perished and were seemed invisible or forgotten in their passing. It’s a great responsibility to remember and through our days together we will face the war against memory as it is expressed against Indigenous Peoples generally, and in this instance, against Chumash People particularly, and shine a light to illuminate complicity and brutality; to give voice to the unspoken.

I think of this conversation in the context of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is an international human rights instrument that establishes minimum standards for the rights of the 500 million or so Indigenous Peoples of the world, and I think of it particularly in regard to Article 13, which states that, Indigenous Peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons …

In essence, this Article recognizes that we have the inherent right to tell our own stories about our own lives and histories, in our own words, emanating from our own identities, experiences and perspectives. And, that this right is an expression of Indigenous Peoples’ right of selfdetermination.

This event is that expression made manifest – in our songs, words, actions, and in the ceremonies that will take place. Because if we are self-actualized, self-determined Peoples – we cannot accept what an external oppressor tells us about who we are, where we are going, and how to get there.

We have to claim and exercise our sovereignty, describe and define our own realities, and we must The War Against Memory, No Sainthood for Junipero Serra

© T. Oros Peters. SGF, September 2015

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! do so every day in every way possible. And that takes courage, and heart, and patience, and it may take time. It’s a process. A process of de-colonization.

That is what this discussion is really all about and why it is historic here today, in Chumash homelands, here, in Sunqcuu. And although we are mostly speaking English here for the panels, we may not all share the same meaning for phrases, or for words. Our perspectives, and perceptions, our life experiences, our memories, and those of our families, and of our ancestors, that which resides within us, blood memory, genetic thinking -- may shape and define our understanding and interpretations of what is being said here today. These will also shape and inform where we will go from here – individually and collectively.

Words like Decolonization and Re-Indigenization. Words like Christianity. Catholicism. The Mission system. Words like priest and god, and pain and anguish. Words like whips and chains.

Words like captive, rape and savage. Predator and prey.

As we move together through this process – we will need patience and focus to strive for the common goal in this discussion of “disrobing” – which is to speak truth; reveal truth. To explore truth; accept truth. To truly begin to disrobe this issue is to undo what has been done. What we are charged to do is to remember, and not pretend otherwise, how they came here, the Destroyers, and in a thousand other places in the Indigenous world, how they came, the Destroyers, and how they came in robes para robar. To rob, to loot, to break, to plunder.

The term itself, “robe,” those long, loose garments worn by priests beginning around the 13th century is a word that comes from an old French term, and also from old Germanic sources including the term rouba referring to plunder, spoils, and vestments, coming from the notion of the garments taken from the enemy as spoils of war, and it is also derived from other dialects, words like raubo and roub – which also referred to "booty or loot” as related to robbery and breakage. These are the terms from which “rob” and also the word robe, come from. That is their lineage – their legacy. Para robar.

Years ago, a wisdom keeper - a trusted leader of another Indigenous nation, told me that his people had a long ago story of how evil came to this continent. He told me how it is still being used, and we are seeing its negative effects on our People ever since it arrived, hundreds of years ago – that the pathway and ripple created of the Destroyers continue to feed upon us.

We know there has always been negative energy – that in all things in life, where there is positive, there is also, always, negative energy. That is a core understanding – especially in Native worldviews, that there is always that balance that motion and that equilibrium is constantly adjusting, and trying to be maintained. Knowing this, I also knew that he was saying. That this was a different kind of evil. The kind of evil that upsets world order, upsets the balance, disjoints the universe. From my perspective, this is the kind of negative that comes to mind when I hear words like the mission system, or canonization –sainthood, and Junipero Serra.

I think of the Ancestors, yours and mine -- in the early days before contact, before contact and colonization, and how they were unrestrained by the limits of linear time or thinking. How the Ancestors became, and how they established life and order and continuity. I think of how they evolved their languages and cultures and consciousness – and their Indigeneity, and how they did The War Against Memory, No Sainthood for Junipero Serra

© T. Oros Peters. SGF, September 2015

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! this through distinct worldviews bonded to their homelands and Original Instructions. They were linked to a continuum of believing and being that were formed of the red clay Earth from which our First Peoples first emerged, and others evolved from the stardust in the midnight sky. I have heard of how some of our peoples know themselves to have come into being when the first foam touched the shore, and still others who identify themselves as forever related to the dolphin, the bear, or corn, or redwood tree – and how their destinies are tied together metaphysically, biologically, emotionally, as memory and as full being.

I dream about the Ancestors, and how they were unbounded by the confines of states or governments or policies, or of museum displays, or anthropological theories that today, seek to limit us, define us, confine us, and ultimately suffocate and destroy us – the continuing colonization of our identities, and the purposeful undoing of our historic and cultural memories, of what we know is truth. I believe there is a direct relationship between linear time, linear thinking and ongoing colonization and how part of our Re-Indigenization process has to do with embracing nonlinear practices, and mostly, with Remembering.

Outsiders first contacted the A:shiwi in 1539 with a Franciscan, De Niza, and an African man who’d been enslaved, Estavanico, and a Catholic mission was established. Here in Chumash homelands, contact was not much later – 1542, by Juan Cabrillo. That is a particular and close proximity of time and experience in our respective Peoples’ histories. It is when Peace was severed across this continent and when the Destroyers came in robes para robar. It is when conquistadors invaded our territories, cutting into our homelands, and dismembering the Ancestors with swords, greed, and God – that close proximity in the colonial history of this continent uniquely links our peoples together, even though our Nations and communities are thousands of miles apart in physical geography.

Our Ancestors had a common and tragic experience of being among the first in North America to see the glint of steel blades in the hot sun, to hear starved dogs barking, and to know the anguished sound of our orphaned children crying. I think about that time, of first contact, and the shock of it, the clash. In the wake of that invasion, in this ongoing process of colonization – because it is ongoing, we are currently in a settler colonial state, colonization is not finished – it is still happening. That is a very important thing for us all to remember – the continuity of it all and how such things last and hold on.

This is especially important to think about in this time of universal fallacy and “spin” – when the truth has many enemies and lies have many friends, while we are still being colonized. Just like we are not post racial, we are also not post-colonial. If we are truly going to “disrobe” and tell the truth, then let’s tell it. If we sincerely want to reveal what that robe is hiding, then now is the time.

Why should we bite our tongues, or hold back our words, what are we afraid of?

Ourselves? Each other? Freedom? Have we been so colonized that we fear liberation from the narrow confines that have been built around us? We have to let ourselves be courageous and face these issues and truly disrobe and dismantle all their attachments. This is not out of the “box thinking.” There is no box.

The box is a lie. The box is a myth. The box is doubt and fear and colonization. And we simply cannot stay within it anymore. It’s not safe there, it never was. The Box is a construct that mirrors The War Against Memory, No Sainthood for Junipero Serra

© T. Oros Peters. SGF, September 2015

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! the Monjerios – windowless places where Native women and girls were held captive and evangelized – laced inside by fear and shackled to walls. On any cold night, you can hear them crying and tearing at the adobe walls with what’s left of their fingernails. That brutality was not solely about the women and girls’ Indigeneity, it was also about their gender and how their Native womanhood is a direct reflection and link to the Earth. I think about how that violence is echoed in assaults against our common Mother Earth today, how the vibrations of then, continue still.

Junipero Serra. Ravenous ruthless, and vicious. Savage. The great devouring, and called it civilization. And it hasn’t yet stopped. It continues. And evil like that is a shapeshifter. In order to survive it takes new forms. Today, I think the sainthood of Junipero Serra is a form it’s taking now; an expression of it. But revealed, disrobed, it’s the same lie. It is a great lie. Yes. We have all been lied to. As John Trudell says, The Great Lie is that it is ‘civilization.’ It’s not civilized, it has been literally the most bloodthirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is NOT civilization that’s “the great lie.” The great lie is that it represents ‘CIVILIZATION.’ That’s the great lie, or if it does represent civilization and it’s truly what civilization is; then the great lie is that civilization is good for us.

The lie has to succeed in order for mainstream society and the “civilization” paradigm of devouring and of taking and consuming – not only of peoples and cultures, but in mega industrial development, in mining, in water diversion, in dams, and clearcutting, in the war against the Natural World, in the rape culture that is ravaging the planet and causing global climate change and mass social chaos. We see it in that paradigm of violence, which is reliant on the perpetuation, and continuity of this great lie. Most importantly, we have to at some level believe in it so that we are complicit in it, in order to keep it alive.

In ravaging the Native Californian Indigenous world with the mission system, including the whippings, the slavery, the destruction, the anguish, in fact, in that worldview, in that twisted paradigm -- Junipero Serra is really a hero. Yes, because in this era of superhero culture, he’s the superhero of the devouring world, and even in his long ago passing, Junipero Serra’s potential sainthood is a trigger -- feeding the bodies, minds and memories of Indigenous Peoples’ into the voracious ever open mouth of Anglo-Christian superiority. There’s harshness with these words, I know. Yet, with them I hope to explore and disrobe, to try to reveal truth. We cannot be complicit in our own oppression.

This worldwide war against Indigenous Peoples and against our histories and knowledge systems, from all angles, has included a critical component of war against memory and against our very identities as Indigenous Peoples, and who and what we identify with, and how it is expressed through what we cherish, and what we respect. Under so many years of oppression and lying, we may even begin to ally with the oppressor, what I named multi-generational Stockholm Syndrome – a self-inflicted wound by which we begin to identify with and even protect our captors.

It’s not about Junipero Serra. Not exactly. It’s about the great lie mentioned earlier and pretending it is the truth. It is about perpetuating that myth through sanctifying genocide by making Junipero Serra a saint. Yes, and it’s about us staying quiet and complicit, and allowing the continuation of the paradigm that changed the course of history, of all of our lives, from one of responsibility, of The War Against Memory, No Sainthood for Junipero Serra

© T. Oros Peters. SGF, September 2015

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! reciprocity, of respect to that of taking, devouring, of never being full or satisfied, no matter how much has been consumed – Peoples, cultures, lands, species, the whole Earth.

Note: On Saturday, May 30, 2015, In opposition of the Pope’s plans to grant Junipero Serra sainthood and the Catholic church’s continued failure to address the real story of the impact of the California missions, the Barbareño Chumash Tribal Council, “’Iyalmuwič” and The American Indian Movement of Southern California, coordinated Native activists, academics, and community leaders to lead discussions in two thought provoking panels under the theme, “DISROBING JUNIPERO SERRA – SAINT OR MONSTER?” in the homelands of the Chumash People, Sunqcuu, which is also known as more generally as Santa Barbara, California.

This piece is excerpted from my presentation that day on the panel topic exploring the International Ramifications of Canonization. Special thanks to the Chumash People, their ancestors and those yet to be born, for allowing me to speak these words on their territories.

The War Against Memory, No Sainthood for Junipero Serra

© T. Oros Peters. SGF, September 2015

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