American Indian Culture and Research Journal

As dusk fell on the evening of 4 August 1989, several Indians gathered in the courtyard of Mission San Diego. They congregated on the east side of the mission grounds near a visit a that had been built earlier that day. Inside the brush lodge, a few Indians and a priest prepared to light candles and say a rosary. One of the Indians attending the ceremony wandered off to be alone and pray. He walked into a sandy, barren Indian cemetery pocked here and there with holes and piles of earth. He stood on the south end of the holy ground to pray and to place an offering into the earth for the spirits of those Indians who had been disturbed. The sacred offering of native sage, tan sinew, and blackbird feathers was left at the site of an unfortunate event-the exhumation of approximately sixty Indian people by the Catholic church to make way for a new parish hall. The evening ceremony and night-long vigil of Kumeyaay Indians and their friends marked the beginning of the end of a heated dispute between the Indians of San Diego and the Catholic church. The controversy had begun nearly a quarter of a century before, when the parish church at Mission San Diego and the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution, began an archaeological dig on mission grounds. Professors, staff, and students at the University of San Diego inaugurated an archaeological project in 1966. Over the years, many students participated in the digs, uncovering an untold number of artifacts and pieces of bone, including those of humans. However, the church and the university repeatedly denied publicly that any human remains had ever been uncovered, despite the fact that one of the first priests-probably Luis Jayme-and at least eight soldiers of the United States Army had been unearthed. Significantly, this denial would lead church authorities and some scholars associated with the University of San Diego to claim publicly that the area of the proposed building site contained no ”cultural remains.”