Craig McKenzie
10/15/15
The first
thing I notice is the skulls in the side of the mission building. This likely
is referring to the sheer number of people that died as a result of introduced
diseases. It also probably refers to the suffering that natives endured under
the mission system. For example, in one California mission, hundreds of people
died in a period of three days because they lacked immunity against measles. I
also see the mission building itself, which resembles an adobe like structure
that Native Americans built. I think this is mocking the assentation that the
missions were trying to help the natives and tried to appeal to them. The
welcome mat and Franciscan Showers sign are reversed. This references the
foreign nature of missions and, while they appeared to be welcoming, the
requirement to use a new language was the opposite of welcoming. Lastly, the
door to the mission enters a long tunnel. There is no apparent end to this
tunnel, meaning that once natives were forcibly baptized, they were not allowed
to leave the mission. As the article mentions, if natives tried to escape the
never ending tunnel, they were just rounded up by soldiers and returned.
I think the
author is trying to convey the innocent appearance of the missions with the
hidden atrocities. The author hides many of the meaningful details while
intently writing welcome and including crossing to make the mission appear
friendly. The purpose was to force people to think and question the mission
system. The missions look nice at first glance but hold many evils of forced
labor and the slaying of innocent peoples.
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