Healing Haunted Histories

A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization

Elaine Enns, Ched Myers

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781725255357, 9781725255364
• eBook ISBN: 9781725255371
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Healing Haunted Histories tackles the oldest and deepest injustices on the North American continent. Violations which inhabit every intersection of settler and Indigenous worlds, past and present. Wounds inextricably woven into the fabric of our personal and political lives. And it argues we can heal those wounds through the inward and outward journey of decolonization. The authors write as, and for, settlers on this journey, exploring the places, peoples, and spirits that have formed (and deformed) us. They look at issues of Indigenous justice and settler "response-ability" through the lens of Elaine's Mennonite family narrative, tracing Landlines, Bloodlines, and Songlines like a braided river. From Ukrainian steppes to Canadian prairies to California chaparral, they examine her forebearers' immigrant travails and trauma, settler unknowing and complicity, and traditions of resilience and conscience. And they invite readers to do the same. Part memoir, part social, historical, and theological analysis, and part practical workbook, this process invites settler Christians (and other people of faith) into a discipleship of decolonization. How are our histories, landscapes, and communities haunted by continuing Indigenous dispossession? How do we transform our colonizing self-perceptions, lifeways, and structures? And how might we practice restorative solidarity with Indigenous communities today?

Chapter 1

Storytelling in a Haunted House

Haunting . . . is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation. Haunting is both acute and general; individuals are haunted, but so are societies. The United States is permanently haunted by the slavery, genocide, and violence entwined in its first, present and future days . . . Haunting aims to wrong the wrongs, a confrontation that settler horror hopes to evade.

—Eve Tuck and C. Ree44

1A. Asistencia Santa Gertrudis, 2005

In July 2005, we moved up from Los Angeles to the Ventura River Watershed. During our first week, driving along Ventura Avenue, we noticed an historical marker. Wanting to learn local lore, we pulled over to take a look. Tucked into some bushes by the side of the road was a stone memorial to the “Asistencia Santa Gertrudis,” marking the approximate location of an auxiliary chapel to Mission San Buenaventura. Ventura County Historic Landmark No. 11, erected in 1970, stated murkily: “It served the Indians in the early days.”

Our curiosity piqued, we asked around, but it was years before we learned the story, and only after some research. Named after Saint Gertrude the Great, a thirteenth-century German Benedictine, the Asistencia was constructed sometime between 1792 and 1809. It was located near the Ventura River, five miles from the main mission, by where the El Camino Real—an historical trail linking a system of twenty-one missions—branched off the coast to head up over the mountains toward Santa Barbara.

The missions, founded between 1769 and 1823 by Franciscans to proselytize, assimilate, and control Native Californians in this far northwestern edge of Spanish territory, were instrumental in the colonization of Alta California. Native Californians were often forced to live in or around the mission settlements and used as workers; the Spanish called them “neophytes” or reducidos. This profoundly disrupted their traditional way of life and brought horrific abuses and oppression.45 It is a matter of debate whether this chapel “served the Indians”; but it was certainly the site of a native Chumash labor camp in the first decades of the nineteenth century. From here workers dug clay from Red Mountain across the river, and built a seven-mile adobe and stone aqueduct to steer water from the Ventura River to the Mission.46

During the Mexican colonial period (1820–1848), the missions were secularized (San Buenaventura in 1836) and went into decline. Around the Asistencia Santa Gertrudis, a small village grew, consisting of Chumash families, probably survivors of mission life or refugees whose traditional lands had been occupied by settlers. The chapel was within sight of a sycamore tree that had long been sacred to valley Chumash.47 The traditional Chumash aps (brush huts) inspired Mexican settlers to call the site Casitas (“little houses”). The name survives on the local landscape—a town, a road, a dam, a lake—but its origins would not be known by most valley residents today.

The historical plaque says nothing about this small native village.48 But multiple reports by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settlers attest that Chumash families farmed by the river, having planted significant fruit orchards around the Asistencia, and sold produce to Ventura.49 A diseño (Mexican plot map) used in an 1847 land-claim dispute over Rancho Cañada Larga shows the Asistencia, and testimony in the case indicates there were Chumash living there at that time. One source stated that in 1861, a former Mission alcalde and Chief of Mission Indians in the area claimed he had forty subjects at the Cañada. A 1932 book on Ventura history claims the chapel was used and occupied by Chumash families as late as 1868, well into the American period—remarkable given the awful fate of most Indigenous Californians after statehood.50 By 1881, however, white settlers reported that the Chapel was in ruins, its roof tiles having been torn off and used for flooring in a house in Ventura, and the site no longer inhabited. Shortly thereafter the remains of the Asistencia were plowed under by Salmon Weldon and the land put into apricots, then citrus, then beans (a nearby canyon bears his name).

In 1965, the lost site of the Asistencia was rediscovered by Cañada Larga ranch foreman Mike Pulido while plowing the bean field. It underwent an emergency archaeological salvage excavation in the spring of 1966 because of a planned freeway extension. Significant Indigenous artifacts were found in and below the Asistencia period layers that testified to the profound change in Chumash lifeways as a result of colonization. In January 1968, the remains of the dig were buried in a pit (possibly near or under the historical marker), and the site paved over by the new highway. The native story was effectively disappeared, reduced to a place name whose origins were obscure and one sentimentalized sentence on a plaque put up by the Native Daughters of the Golden West.51

Mike Pulido’s son is Ched’s barber, and it was from him that we first heard about the deeper history of the site. Mike Jr.’s wife, Carol, is a local Chumash cultural officer, who as a young woman took part in the Asistencia dig. She’s been teaching us about her people in this area, and points out that the 1968 destruction of the historic site could never happen today, thanks to slow but steady improvement in federal cultural remains legislation, fought for by Indigenous advocates over the last several decades. Another local Chumash elder has stood with us at the site and whispered about ghostly presences in abandoned ranch houses and trees nearby.

Since learning this history, with the blessing of these elders, we’ve “adopted” the Asistencia site which so mystified us years earlier, keeping it clean of trash and planting and tending native species after the 2017 Thomas Fire burned everything but the stone memorial. We’ve noticed that a few others, unknown to us, continue to leave offerings and mementos there too. On the fiftieth anniversar...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Storytelling in a Haunted House
• Part I: Archaeology
• Part II: Cartography
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Appendix I: Annotated Bibliography on Recent Intergenerational Trauma Studies
• Appendix II: Longer Biblical Texts
• Appendix III: Organizations Cited
• Bibliography