In the centers of the villages, they built circular chambers of willow and cattail and brush. The tribes to the north called this sacred sweathouse a yoba, the southern tribes called it a wankech. Here they held their major religious ceremony, the toloache ritual, where the young men drank a jimsonweed liquid, and saw visions, and were initiated as adults. Each sacred chamber held an image of their most important god, Chinigchinich, the one who had named things. The complete skin of a coyote or wildcat was removed from a body, then filled with arrows, feathers, deer horns, lions’ claws, beaks and talons of hawks, and sewn back up, so that it resembled the live animal, except that arrows came out of its mouth, and it wore a feather skirt. During the toloache ritual Chinigchinich spoke to the participants through this image, telling them the secret names of all things, which revealed their innermost identities, and gave humans power over them. And so the young became adults.

This is what we know of them; and we know that their village life went on, year after year, generation after generation, existing in an unobtrusive balance with the land, using all of its many resources, considering every rock and tree and animal a sacred being—for seven thousand years. For seven thousand years!

See them, in your mind’s eye, if you can, living out their lives on that basin crowded with life. Doing the day’s work in the steady sun. Visiting the neighboring village. Courting. Sitting around a fire at dusk. See it.

And then a band of men came by, looking kind of like crabs, wearing shells that they could take off. They could kill from a distance with a noise. They didn’t know any of the languages, but had one of their own. History began.

When these soldiers left, the Franciscans stayed. After Junipero Serra founded San Juan Capistrano, in 1776, and went on up “El Camino Real” to found the rest of the missions, a Fray Gerónimo Boscana stayed behind to help run the mission, and convert the locals to Christianity. Those around the mission were called Juaneños, after the mission; those farther north were called Gabrielinos, after the mission at San Gabriel. Fray Boscana wrote, “I consider these Indians in their endowments like the soul of an infant.”

And so he put them to good Christian work, cultivating the land and building the mission. Within fifty years all of them were dead. And all that went away.

Chapter 22

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