California Indians histories are interwoven from oral accounts of our ancestors’ hardships and triumphs, intertwining experiences of lost and concealed culture, traditions, and perspectives on our past, bound together by generations that have overcome adversity through endless resiliency, directly tying Indian people to our ancestors’ experiences, Indigenous knowledge systems, cultural connections and familial bonds. One overlooked narrative in California history is that of the Mission boarding school experience. California Indian boarding school literature continues be dominated by the Sherman Institute, and there remains an absence of perspectives of California Indian students attending Saint Boniface Indian Industrial School. Cross referencing archival documents, oral histories, and family photographs, this thesis provides a narrative of California Indian Mission school history by exploring how descendants of former students are (re)writing and (re)righting histories. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how descendants of one family from Sahatapah, California have overcome the loss of familial bonds and cultural connections to reclaim their California Indian heritage.

The emergence of the remains of Indigenous youth at residential schools in Canada and the United States has rekindled discourse on the tumultuous and violent history that Indigenous people have with colonial schooling. In California, Indigenous Peoples experienced three separate waves of colonialism by Spain, Mexico, and the U.S., each bringing forth distinctive colonial schooling practices via governments, churches, and settlers. Presently, research on colonial schooling in the U.S. continues to be dominated by narratives of student and administrators’ experiences at federally-run Indian boarding schools across the nation. Furthermore, discourse on Indian education in California fails to view religious doctrine and vocational training introduced to Indigenous peoples at the Spanish missions and Mexican ranchos as colonial schooling. Centering Indigenous narratives, this phenomenological study examined the experiences of Southern California Indians with Indigenous education and colonial schooling from pre-invasion through the Spanish mission, Mexican rancho, and American Mission Indian boarding school eras. Through the application of the theoretical frameworks of settler colonialism and Indigenous survivance, this phenomenological study will utilize archival ethnography and oral histories to examine the legacy of colonial schooling and how Southern California Indians have resisted and refused assimilation into settler colonial society. Study teachings describe the actions that settlers enacted against California Indians and the ways that Native Peoples utilized Ancestral teachings to refuse and reject assimilation. An emerging teaching in this study found that unconditional love—from Creator and the Ancestors—was a driving force in California Indian resistance and refusal of colonial norms, and the embracement of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing.