Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California

“Lisbeth Haas tells a new, deeper history of Indians and colonists in California. Listening closely to the voices of native leaders, artisans, painters, and translators who labored in Spanish missions, she uncovers previously obscured places and forms of indigenous power in a brutal world of conquest, exploitation, and loss. Thinking broadly, she shows how Spanish and Mexican California were an integral part of a larger hemispheric story of colonial expansion, indigenous resistance, and contested borderlands. A vastly important book.” –Pekka Hamalainen, author of “The Comanche Empire”
“Told with rare feeling as well as erudition, Saints and Citizens places native peoples squarely into the precarious history of freedom and survival, both as subjects and agents. The sweep and specificity of this book are impressive: this is a major work by a leading scholar.”
–William B. Taylor, Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor of History, Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
“Lisbeth Haas powerfully illuminates how Spanish missions became functioning parts of the indigenous geography of California, as native peoples like the Chumash and Luisenos transformed them into sacred and political spaces for their own practices, beliefs, authority, and historical narration. Particular compelling is the depiction of native artisanship, translation, writing, and oral history in creating an ‘indigenous archive’ essential to understanding the story of colonial California.” –Juliana Barr, author of “Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands”
“Building on the historical traditions of the northern Mexican borderlands, “Saints and Citizens” offers a model of comparative ethnohistory that emphasizes the creation of indigenous colonial spaces and historical narration. Lisbeth Haas blends archival sources with imagery, dance, and ethnography to demonstrate the indigenous production of knowledge in ways that complicate the concepts of indigeneity, subjecthood, and citizenship in both the colonial and Mexican eras of California history.” –Cynthia Radding, author of “Landscapes of Power and Identity: Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Republic”
“‘Indigenous Histories’–the first words in the subtitle of Lisbeth Haas’s book–might, in other hands, indicate a collection of material “about” Indigenous populations. Instead, Haas turns the phrase into a verb, privileging Indian voices, art, music, stories, and testimonies as acts of sovereignty that “will be heard,” no matter how buried. Still we rise!” –Deborah A. Miranda, author of “Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir”