American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Because the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians formalized and codified the criminalization and carcerality of California Indians on federal, state, and local government and community levels, it serves as a critical analytical tool to connect the missionization of California Indians to the legacies that contribute to their mass incarceration today. This specific time period marks a shift from Mission and Spanish control to one of conquest by law and criminalization. This article begins by examining the specific conditions of the monjerío, the room in every mission that locked young girls and women up until marriage, and how it functions as a site of gendering and racialization. Then, culling from newspaper sources and analyzing the logics of containment and elimination that these archival sources produce, I examine the following questions: How did the gendering and racialization of California Indians through missionization allow for the legality of the act? How does it formalize those ideologies of Native criminality? And how did the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians actually encourage and legitimize violence against California Indians?