The Journal of California Anthropology

I am very grateful to Professor Aschmann for correcting my more speculative flights. It is, of course, true that the Jesuit and Dominican missions killed off the native populations as fast as the Franciscans did, and that the Jesuits were out of the field by 1769. My impression is still that overall Jesuit policy was relatively mild—cf. the well-known experiment with Utopian planning among the Indians in Paraguay, for instance—and that this relatively mild policy was one of the reasons for their downfall in the New World. Their record in Baja California was certainly a sad one, however. As to the Dominicans, my memory seems to have simply played me false. It appears that things were even worse than I thought for the unfortunate missionized Indians of the Californias!