In an address at the United Nations, a South Valley Native American leader said a campaign to recognize California’s historic El Camino Real trail is an attempt to rob Native American’s of their heritage while honoring their oppressors.
“The fact is that the El Camino Real was established on indigenous trade routes that were use by our ancestors for thousands of years,” said Valentine Lopez, who grew up in San Martin and Morgan Hill, at a gathering of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in an April 27 address in the UN’s General Assembly in New York City.
“The use of our trade routes by Spain and the Catholic Church resulted in ethnocide, slavery, brutality and domination,” said Lopez, who is Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.
He later suggested in an email that “all symbols and place names” in California that honor those responsible for the destruction of Indian culture should be removed.
Central California was historically Amah Mutsun land, while other tribes inhabited the rest of the state before Europeans arrived.
The target of Lopez’s criticism is a fledgling campaign by the California Missions Foundation to designate the El Camino Real as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The non-profit Santa Barbara group works to preserve California Missions, according to its website,californiamissionsfoundation.org.
The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designates world Heritage Sites as having special cultural or physical significance.
The Spanish name El Camino Real means The King’s Highway, and refers to a 600-mile network that connected the 21 Spanish missions from San Diego to Sonoma.
CMF executive director David Bolton said in a May 8 interview that he was unaware of Lopez’s address to the United Nations.
After reading a copy of the comments, Bolton said Indians have been involved in the campaign from the beginning.
“It is not true that the California Missions Foundation is planning to do this without tribal input,” Bolton said. “It’s very important to the process, the history and to our plans.”
The campaign to nominate the route as a World Heritage Site will take years and is in its “infancy stages,” Bolton said.
The CMF has held conferences on the subject in San Diego and San Juan Bautista that included Native Americans.
Lopez confirmed he spoke at the latter but at the time was not aware of the CMF campaign.
“If I was aware of the proposal I surely would have spoken out against it,” he said, adding the conference audience gave him “the longest and loudest applause that I ever received” when he mentioned, in part, “the Catholic Church was a perpetrator to our destruction and domination.”
The CMF’s promotion of the symbols and institutions that “glorify” what was done to Native Americans, “Make them a perpetrator to our historic trauma,” he said in an email.
The goal of his tribe’s efforts to prevent the World Heritage Site nomination is five-fold, he said.
•To tell the true history of California’s Indians;
•To prevent anything that honors, glorifies or accepts the destruction and domination of tribal ancestors;
•To tell those who destroyed Native American culture that they must heal for their sins, crimes and offenses;
•To remove all symbols and place names that honor those responsible for the Indians’ destruction, and;
•To let governments and institutions know that they can only have a healthy relationship with Indian Tribes when they have recovered from their soul wound, that without honesty and healing there can be no trust or healthy relationship.
“At the missions, our ancestors were whipped, put in shackles (and) stocks, raped. The Church and Spain intentionally sought to destroy our culture, environment and spirituality,” Lopez said.
That is what the El Camino Real and other Spanish names mean to California tribes, he said.
Native American tribes refuse to accept heritage status for any institution or symbols that “glorify the death of 150,000 California Indians,” he said in an email after his UN speech.
Citing the removal of the Confederate flag and statues of Thomas Jefferson in the South, Lopez said many names and symbols in California represent “memories of our genocide.
“It’s time for all people to recognize the true history of what happened to California Indians,” he said.
There are no efforts to glorify the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide, so, “Why is it OK to glorify the destruction and dominations of California Indians?” he asked.
Bolton said CMF’s campaign is “multi-national” because it includes “the sovereign (Native American) nations of California both in dialogue and effort.”
But Lopez said the CMF’s approach is all wrong.
“(He) is right when he says Native Americans are included (but) he is working with scholars who are cooperating with his efforts…“My point is that CMF should be dealing with legitimate tribal governments…only tribes can speak for their territory.”
He told his UN audience, “Unfortunately, the history as told by the California Mission Foundation minimizes and/or ignores” the fact that native peoples created the route that was then used to help subjugate them by the Europeans and the Church.”
Bolton said CMF does recognize that native peoples created the route long before the Spanish used it.
The CMF calls it by its Spanish name because it’s the only name it has ever had, not to honor Spain or to diminish Native American history, Bolton said.
But the Foundation “seeks to steel and co-op (sic) indigenous heritage while recognizing the El Camino Real…for the honor and benefit it brought to both colonizers and today’s society by Spain and the California Mission system,” Lopez told the UN group.
According to the official Amah Mutsun website, www.amahmutsun.org, the Native American community, “was originally made up of approximately 20 to 30 contiguous villages stretched across the Pajaro River Basin and surrounding region.
Today, the Tribal Band has an enrolled membership of “nearly 600 documented Indians,” according to the website.
