We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions

We Will Receive Justice explores how Native people in the southern San Francisco Bay Area―the ancestors of today’s Ohlone community―navigated the collapse of the California mission system. The volume spans from Mexican independence in 1821 through the region’s annexation by the United States in 1846, as Native people from Mission Santa Clara and Mission San José fought for emancipation and restitution amid rapidly changing colonial circumstances.

The narrative is driven by a reexamination of archives related to the Pueblo of San José, the territorial capital of Monterey, and early U.S. court cases regarding Mexican-era land grants, contextualized through an in-depth analysis of mission records that illuminate the complex social connections of Native individuals and families. We Will Receive Justice offers an ethnohistorical lens for viewing the Indigenous history of Mexican California, examining not simply the history of colonization but how Native people drew on cultural traditions and social relationships to create new lives for themselves in the wake of the Franciscan mission system.

Lee M. Panich is a professor of anthropology at Santa Clara University. He is the author of Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California and is the coeditor of several volumes, including most recently Archaeologies of Indigenous Presence. Gustavo Flores is a lecturer of anthropology at San Jose State University.