Examines how Native artists kept their culture alive by creatively adapting under colonial rule

Between 1769 and 1823, the Franciscans established twenty-one missions in California, colonizing the ancestral territories of many Native communities between present-day Sonoma and San Diego. In Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture, Gabrieleno Tongva scholar Yve Chavez highlights how these communities preserved their cultural practices amid colonial oppression. Rooted in Chavez’s ancestral homeland and the neighboring Chumash region in coastal Southern California, her book focuses on Mission San Gabriel, Mission San Buenaventura, and Mission Santa Barbara. Recasting these sites as spaces of Native cultural heritage, Yve Chavez examines how Indigenous artists resisted assimilation while accommodating foreign ideas into their established practices.

Drawing on Indigenous knowledge and art historical research of performance and regalia, basketry, sculpture, and architecture, Chavez demonstrates how Native artists navigated colonial power structures, ensuring the survival of their customs during the mission era and beyond. Rather than replacing Indigenous identity, the missions became spaces through which Native people asserted their connection to the landscape and its resources. This analysis not only recasts mission art and architecture within an Indigenizing framework but also serves as a vital resource for understanding the ongoing significance of these sites for the descendants of mission survivors.

"Indigenizing California Mission Art and Architecture is a fresh addition to California mission scholarship framed through close examinations of Native artistic expression, enhanced by Chavez’s deep connection to the history."—Michelle Lorimer, California State University, San Bernadino

"Yve Chavez upends inaccurate histories of colonial gain and Indigenous disappearance at California’s missions through a careful study of Native placemaking and survivance that honors the often dismissed creativity and enduring legacy of Gabrieleño and Chumash artists."—Tsim Schneider, University of California, Santa Cruz