Indians of California: The Changing Image

by James J. Rawls

Book Overview

When the first Anglo-Americans visited California early in the nineteenth century, the future state was still a remote province of the Spanish empire. Early visitors, filled with a sense of American's Manifest Destiny, described the missionary priests and their Indian converts in terms of the Black Legend of Spanish abuse of native peoples. Later, when the Anglos settled in California and assumed the life-style of the Mexican rancheros, they viewed...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806120207
• ISBN13: 9780806120201
• Release Date: September 1986
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 310 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

an invaluable resource....

....and one I'm surprised hasn't been reviewed here before.If you want to understand the shifting perspectives of Spanish conquerers, European settlers, and American heirs of colonized California toward its Native inhabitants, then start with this readable outline, which traces these shifts over time with numerous quotations and documentary examples of how the whites perceived their "root-digger" neighbors.What makes this book particularly convincing is that it refuses either to demonize all white efforts on behalf of Native rights or to idealize them as so many of the early missionaries did, righteously convinced they were helping and uplifting the very people who were dying in the thousands of violence, culture shock, and European diseases against which they had no defense.This book belongs on every shelf dedicated to the history of California.