1. The terms "Gabrielino" and "Luiseño," although currently employed by the federal government to specify my Native Californian descent, are monikers of the Spanish mission era. I prefer to describe and think about a portion of my indigenous ethnicity using a Luiseño term, Payomkawish^{[ *]} . The term, translatable as "Westerner," was originally employed in Luiseño territory to describe an individual residing in proximity to the coast. Both my grandmother, a Maritime Shoshone/Luiseño, and my late grandfather, a Maritime Shoshone, descend from island and coastal peoples. However, it is through my grandmother's (inland) Luiseño lineage that I am a member of the Temecula Band of Luiseños (Pechanga Reservation, Riverside County, California). My grandfather's nation (Maritime Shoshone, or, Island Gabrielino) was not granted a reservation land base, but was declared "extinct" by the federal government. For more information on the Gabrielinos and Luiseños, see Alfred L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1925); and Bernice E. Johnston, California's Gabrielino Indians (Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1962).

2. The construction of the present church, for example, took many years to complete and probably did not begin until 1790. Johnston, p. 129.

3. For more detailed information, see Thomas Workman Temple II, "Toypurina the Witch and the Indian Uprising at San Gabriel," Masterkey 32, no. 5 (1958): 136-54. Though I do not recommend this essay as unbiased or inoffensive reading (it is incredibly Euro-centered), it was authored by an individual of English and Spanish descent (in fact a relation of my Spanish great-grandmother) who, like myself, spent his youth at the original site of Mission San Gabriel (La Misión Vieja), and was informed by his family's folklore of the region. The stories he heard about Toypurina as a child made him determined to learn more about her, and to remember her in his research and writing. The essay's chronology of events runs closely to the folklore I heard as a child, from both my European and Native Californian elders.

4. Temple, who translated from the Spanish the principal documents associated with this revolt, states Toypurina was "reputed and feared as the wisest sorceress among the Gabrielinos." Ibid., p. 147. (In the Luiseño language, one term for such a wise and spiritually gifted individual is puula. )

5. Ibid., p. 136. Not that other native women in southern California did not lead protests or revolts against the Spanish colonial order (there are many strong, successful women leaders in our pasts and presents as native peoples), but that its imposers apparently felt Toypurina's power and her actions to be particularly threatening, not historically erasable.

6. Ibid., pp. 139, 141. It is also stated elsewhere (Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XVIII, History of California, Vol. I, 1542-1800 [San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft and Company, 1884], p. 460) that twenty prisoners were seized.

7. Temple, pp. 147-48; see also note 8, below. Toypurina probably also had knowledge of the fates of others leading attacks against the priests and soldiers of Mission San Gabriel. In fact, it was only within days of its establishment—when the Spanish, victorious in a first revolt, decapitated a local chief and drove his head onto a stake of the newly constructed willow stockade—that the kinds of consequences the people could expect to incur by revolting against their hideous acts (in this case, the mission's soldiers had lassoed and raped the dead chief's wife) were made horrifically clear. Johnston, p. 130.

8. In Toypurina's person, two traditions of leadership met and overlapped: that of the hereditary chief (as was customary among the "Gabrielino" peoples, Toypurina stood in a position to inherit this role of village leadership from her brother); and that of the intellectually and spiritually elite of her people, among whom she held the most prominent and powerful role.

9. The threat of flogging and other forms of torture is repeatedly expressed by Temple, pp. 141, 143, 144, and 146. Moreover, many of Toypurina's captured associates had already endured severe lashings for their part in the attack. Hugo Reid (an early essayist of Gabrielino history, life, and culture who was married to a Gabrielino woman) records that the type of rawhide scourge routinely used at Mission San Gabriel was "immense . . . about ten feet in length, plaited to the thickness of an ordinary man's wrist! " ( The Indians of Los Angeles County: Hugo Reid's Letters of 1852, ed. Robert F. Heizer [Los Angeles: Southwest Museum, 1968], p. 85). At Mission San Gabriel, no indigenous man, woman, or child was exempt from such torture, meted out on a daily basis. Listen, for example, to what Reid, by way of his wife, Bartolomea, recounts was the fate of women miscarrying at the mission: "when a woman had the misfortune to bring forth a still-born child, she was punished. The penalty inflicted was, shaving the head, flogging for fifteen subsequent days, iron on the feet for three months, and having to appear every Sunday in church, on the steps leading up to the alter, with a hideous painted wooden child in her arms!" (p. 87). Reid also records that individuals holding elite social positions such as Toypurina's were kept "chained together . . . and well flogged . . . and so they worked, two above and two below in the pit'' (ibid.).

10. Though Temple (p. 148) emphasizes these are Toypurina's "exact words," it is evident he incorporates his family's folklore into his translation, or telling, of the original Spanish text of this trial, a public record in the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (Ramo de Provincias Internas, volume 20, pp. 31-47). Having some knowledge and understanding of my native language (and given that Toypurina's statement here is a translation of a translation), "exact sentiments" would have been a more accurate expression for Temple to use. But to offer a picture of the type of ecosystem Toypurina was seeking to protect, I quote Reid (p. 72) in reference to the mission site established at San Gabriel:

at the conquest of this country . . . [this site was] a complete forest of oaks, with considerable underwood. . . . The water, which now composes the lagoon of the mill (one mile and a half distant) being free, like everything else, to wander and meander where it pleased, came down into the hollow nearest to the Mission, on the Angeles road. This hollow was a complete thicket, formed of sycamores, cotton-wood, larch, ash and willows; besides, brambles, nettles, palma cristi, wild roses and wild grape-vines lent a hand to make it impassable, except where foot paths had rendered entrance to its barriers a matter more easy of accomplishment. This hollow, cleared of all encumbrance, served to raise the first crops ever produced at the Mission, and although now a washed waste of gravel and sand, nevertheless, at that time it rejoiced in a rich black soil.

11. Temple, pp. 150-51; Bancroft, p. 460. It is said the conditions of Toypurina's release from solitary confinement were that she "convert" to Christianity and submit herself to being baptized, an act from which, the Spaniards knew, she would not be able to recover her religious, political, and personal power among her people. Toypurina was not a mission neophyte at the time of her revolt; she said she revolted "to give courage" to those within the system "who would have the heart to fight." (Translation, Dr. Rosamel Benavides, Humboldt University; my thanks to Sarah Supahan for sharing this valuable translation of Toypurina's testimony with me. From it I sense she also revolted to retain her power as a religious leader—power the invading mission system was adversely affecting by the forced removal of native peoples from their home communities and the imposition of Christianity and slavery upon them.) Given Toypurina's influence and her people's views surrounding baptism, the Spaniards stood to gain much by making an example of her—"converting" her by way of torture, then banishing her to labor at distant missions. Here is Reid (pp. 74-75) on the subject as it relates to Mission San Gabriel: ''Baptism as performed, and the recital of a few words not understood, can hardly be said to be conversion; nevertheless, it was productive of great advantage to the Missionaries, because once baptized they lost 'caste' with their people. . . . Baptism was called by them soyna, 'being bathed,' and strange to say, was looked upon, although such a simple ceremony, as being ignominious and degrading."

12. Toypurina's actions also speak volumes regarding women's rights and roles in indigenous southern Californian communities. Note that Toypurina achieved something few women, regardless of ethnicity or color, were able to achieve during the eighteenth century: she successfully forced an audience of some of the most influential European men residing in Alta California (Governor Don Pedro Fages, for instance) to hear, by way of her revolt and interrogation, the grievances of her people. Though a Native American woman living in an era in which both women and indigenous peoples were viewed by the Spanish as inferior, Toypurina produced disconcert and awe in her inquisitors, who elected to spare her life (in fear of escalating the situation further and incurring more attacks upon the mission?). Writes Temple (p. 148): "If looks could kill . . . her inquisitors would have dropped like autumn leaves. She was proud and headstrong alright—a commanding personality, then 24, and really attractive. Here was no wild animal at bay, for her arrogant face and almost queenly stance despite her bonds, soon dispelled any such comparison to the tough and hardbitten veterans who faced her. They were properly impressed."

13. That is, those Interior and Island Gabrielinos whose families survived generations of slavery and genocide—not an easy feat, considering that the enslavement and genocide of native peoples in southern California occurred well into the American period of California's colonial history. Once likely the most populous nations in indigenous California, totaling perhaps as many as 15,000 to 20,000 individuals, Interior and Island "Gabrielino" peoples were reduced to near extinction by the year 1910 (Kroeber, p. 883). Many other indigenous Californian nations suffered the same fate. Though the region of present-day California is considered to have been very densely populated—perhaps more densely populated than any other region of North America—its indigenous Californian population, "perhaps approaching 705,000," was reduced "to about 260,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century, then to only 15,000 to 20,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century" (Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987], p. 200).

14. My family has long told this version of this story to its children. For another, see Reid, p. 54.

15. See Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Spinsters/aunt lute, 1987) for her discerning views and writing on the use of, and movement between, holistic and other modes of thought.

16. Sally W. Smith, "Wildlife and Endangered Species: In Precipitous Decline," in California's Threatened Environment: Restoring the Dream, ed. Tim Palmer (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), pp. 226, 227.

17. Tim Palmer, "The Abundance and the Remains," in California's Threatened Environment, p. 9.