Colonial Missions in the North American Southwest: Social Memory and Ethnogenesis

Resumo

Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, European Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries established missions for Native American groups throughout the American Southwest and modern northern Mexico. The process and methodologies of missionization implied radical changes in Native American societies and culture. The impact of such changes was different for settled, crop-growing groups than it was for those who were nomadic and made a living gathering and hunting. Equally important was the way the contact generation and second generation Natives adapted, reacted, or acted on the processes of indoctrination and acculturation. Using archival texts, practice theory and concepts such as structuration and hegemony, this paper explores identity formation and argues for the embeddedness of missionizing practices in ethnogenesis. Practice theory and concepts such as the habitus and hegemony provide the means to interrogate missionary texts such as confessionary manuals and catechisms and investigate how these refashioned social arrangements affected shamanistic practices. Likewise, structuration à la Giddens facilitates an understanding of the way rules, stated and understated, practices, and social relationships were produced and reproduced in individual and collective social interactions between the missionized and the missionaries. As Native peoples were exposed to the institution of the mission they retained Native habitual practices and traditions while embedding new routines and practices in repeated social actions and interactions. Often displaced and culturally diasporic, the generations that emerged out of the colonial mission system, and particularly modern Native groups, were jolted into contextualizing and reinterpreting their culture in the process of ethnogenesis, a negotiation and articulation of shared meanings and experiences that produces an identifiable cultural entity whose members feel they belong together. In the case of many missionized Native American groups that process of identity formation includes a large Catholic heritage component, which, in some cases, is the key defining element of the expression of their modern identity.