Native American leaders press for monument to replace Junipero Serra statue
Native American leaders in California rallied Wednesday outside the State House to urge passage of a bill that would replace a recently toppled statue of 18th century Spanish colonizer Junipero Serra with a monument in Capitol Park that honors Native American tribes living in the Sacramento area.
Source: Livestream of James Ramos' press conference.
Assemblyman James Ramos calls for passage of Assembly Bill 338.
“The Serra statue is a symbol of a dark period of time when genocide was inflicted on our people and the beginning of the mentality that views people living in California as less than human,” said Assemblyman James Ramos, D-Highland, the first Native American elected to the Legislature and sponsor of the bill. “Most Californians have a romanticized image of the mission period, and don’t realize that for the state’s Native Americans it was a period of forced assimilation and servitude, family separation, starvation and other abuses.”
Jesus Tarango, chairman of Wilton Rancheria, whose tribe is among those sponsoring AB 338, said at the rally, “This bill will begin to tell that history for us and for future generations.”
Assembly Bill 338 has moved through the Legislature with little opposition and needs only the approval of the Senate before it heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom for his signature. It would authorize a monument honoring indigenous California that would be designed in consultation with Native American leaders and funded privately by tribal nations. It would replace the life-size statue of Father Serra, which was erected on the State House grounds in 1967. It was toppled on July 4, 2020; Serra statues in San Francisco and Los Angeles were torn down about the same time.
Serra was a Franciscan missionary who founded nine California missions, including the first, in San Diego, in 1769, to convert Native Americans to Christianity. Pope Francis canonized Serra during a visit to the United States in 2015.
In opposing AB 338, the Pacific Justice Institute – Center of Public Policy, said, “The provision to tear out the law written to erect and maintain a monument in honor of Father Serra is nothing less than the validation and codification of anti-Christian mob violence.”