A California Confessionario: Reckoning with the Sins of the Church in the California Missions

California Indian Amah Mutsun response to an early 19th century confessional manual written in Mutsun, an Ohlone language from northern California, by the missionary friar Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta OFM.  Spanish missionaries to the Americas published and disseminated confessionarios, confessional guides or handbooks that priests used to instruct Indigenous people through the sacrament, including in Alta California. In California, the sacrament of confession was also related to the Papal Bulls.  Those that did not convert and practice confession were to be “vanquished”.  What does it mean to be ‘vanquished” in the California Indian context?  At Mission San Juan Bautista 19,421 Indigenous people died between 1797-1823.  3,200 were buried in a tiny graveyard, a mass grave, at San Juan Bautista. The California missions were not about conversion but about punishing a resistant population, about domination and control. The working definition of sin is problematic because it centers the Spanish view. The California Indian voice should become the moral standard in evaluating the crimes of the mission system and the colonizeers.