California’s Franciscan missions were grounded in Indigenous homelands that to this day remain largely undertheorized and trivialized by scholarly and popular understandings of missions as inescapable fortresses of confinement. Narratives that position California’s missions as places of Indigenous imprisonment endure but they are at odds with a growing body of archaeological and documentary evidence demonstrating the persistence of Native lives, activities, and decision-making taking place within and beyond the walls of missions. We argue that interpretations of the missions in scholarly and popular conversation must make Indigenous persistence and resilient relationships to meaningful landscapes the cardinal priorities, not secondary attributes, in the study of Indigenous responses to colonization.

Conventional accounts of missionary and settler colonialism in California have overemphasized the loss experienced by Native Americans. For indigenous Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people of the San Francisco Bay Area, a story of loss contrasts sharply with their casino—a symbol of prosperity—established in 2013. Each narrative is anchored to highly visible places that commemorate either loss or success. These places, examined here using two case studies, also conceal an important “heritage in-between”—that is, the critical time period, spaces, and things that reflect native resilience and transformation—that might serve to better contextualize both narrative projects.