“Remember the Kumeyaay Rebellion: A Pilgrimage to Sites of California Indian Resistance to Spanish Missions”

San Diego mission was the site of our largest Kumeyaay rebellion. We burned it several times, killing the missionary Father Luis Jayme and two others on November 5, 1775. The Kumeyaay destroyed missions in San Diego and Baja California, leaving them as rubble. This was a form of strategic resistance focused on systematically destroying the missions. The Kumeyaay still have our Native language because we burned the missions down. One difficult question that remains is why were some groups able to successfully resist Spanish missionization and keep a majority of their culture intact while others succumbed to the foreign missionizing of their people. This paper is based on community knowledge including histories gathered through the use of interviews and conversations with descendants of those who were missionized during a pilgrimage I guided to sites of Indian resistance to Spanish mission on the U.S.-Mexican border. .