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.

There is a well-established call for more attention to contested and dissonant cultural heritage in the public memory of historic places, particularly in attending to ethnic, class, and gendered experiences. Although hailing the contributions made to date, critics have also observed that the results have tended to be confined to symbolic or rhetorical effects. Utilizing the insights of engaged anthropology, we examine the potential of a community-engaged, collaborative research design that integrates oral history, archaeology, and archival research as a means of building a polyvocal public memory. The study is carried out “in place” at a long-sacred public plaza that has been the subject of interpretive controversy for many decades. We suggest that the combination of oral history and archaeological methodologies, carried out simultaneously and on-site with the community, enables an interplay of material, spatial, and discursive perspectives that moves contested cultural heritage from “narrative to action.”

The subject of this essay is the judicial context of bodies from mass graves. I shall discuss topics that exemplify the power that flows from being able to display bodies to courts. By contrast, and where there are no bodies to show, a lazy prosecution case can be weakened by the unnecessary lack of material evidence. Particularly vulnerable are cases that depend on the statements of eye-witnesses. I shall discuss efforts by revisionists to protect their positions. These efforts include denying that there are any bodies as well as claims that the number of bodies is less than expected and that the bodies are attributable to unrelated events. These discussions will be illustrated with critical evidentiary photos.