Week 9. Decolonizing the Tenderloin
Text by Helen Bronston
Milliken’s work is a description of the first decades of contact between Spanish missionaries and the indigenous peoples who lived in the San Francisco Bay area. Working from the archives of the missions as well as letters and military records, Milliken attempts to understand the experience of the several tribes as they were both drawn to the Spaniard’s alien culture and more powerful technology, and as they were forced by disease, loss of resources, and military action to relinquish their lands and way of life and move into the missions. Milliken acknowledges that his effort is hampered by a lack of indigenous voices – either in the archive or as oral tradition – and participants in the conversation pointed to several recent texts that present the perspective of Native Californians. Of particular interest are Deborah A. Miranda’s article “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California” (GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 16:1-2, 2010, 253-284) and her memoir Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Berkeley: Heyday, 2013).
Milliken describes the pre-contact social, linguistic, and ecological landscape of the Bay Area, and describes the growth of the missions – and the consequent destabilization and diminution of the tribal groups. The ecology and culture of the Tenderloin is presented in passing in the text. The shoreline of San Francisco, much altered after Spanish settlement, previously ran much closer to the intersection of Turk and Taylor, and shell mounds are present in the area. Creeks also crossed the area, creating attractive sites for settlements.
The issue of definition or permanence was raised in the discussion. Two-spirit individuals were accepted within indigenous cultures but were effectively defined out of existence by Spanish insistence upon a gender binary to police sexual relations. Notably, women of marriageable age were confined to locked houses at night within the missions. This action required acts of determination and definition, noted down in records, acts which were understood as permanently valid. Christian conversion, which the Missions encouraged for the Indians, was also seen as a permanent condition which bound the Indian forever to the Church and the Mission system. Missionaries used force to return run-away Indian converts to the Missions. Also, Indians would be forcibly confined to the Mission, even when disease spread among the people. Fluidity of identity and belief, as well as physical mobility were seen as threats to the mission social order and were strongly repressed.
In this we see how bureaucratic social systems dependent upon writing and record-keeping for their continued validity are threatened by circumstances and identities which threaten the permanence of the written word. In the beginning, the Bible tells us, was the Word. Soon followed the division of light from dark, and at this point all fluidity fled. Catholic missionaries were primed by their culture and beliefs to see and enforce a social system based on permanent identities, relationships, and ownership, while all three of these categories were apparently much more fluid in native systems of thought that prioritized negotiation and balance. If we are concerned with decarceration, how might we look to native systems of thought for guidance?
A side discussion pointed to the absence of two-spirit indigenous peoples in Milliken’s text, and to the early research of Alfred Kroeber on this topic in California, especially in relation to his daughter Ursula K. LeGuin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which includes the concept of different, more fluid forms of sexuality and gender expression than our accustomed binary definitions. For more on gender and sexual variance among California Indians see Miranda’s texts mentioned above.
Conversation moved from the history of mission settlement and native incorporation to the present-day role of religion in the Tenderloin. With the example of the missions before us, we considered the progressive role of some mainline-protestant churches (especially Glide Memorial in San Francisco) in reaching out to gay and lesbian communities in the 1960s. The Council on Religion and the Homosexual in San Francisco was Important for bringing main-line protestant churches on board with considering homosexuality as compatible with protestant Christian religion. The Council sponsored the Mardis Gras Drag Ball on New Year’s Eve, 1965-6, deliberately so it would be raided by police and so they could publicize the raid as a way to change social attitudes towards homosexuals and the policing of conduct. In the 1960s, progressive Methodist church members of Glide wanted to turn it into a new kind of progressive urban ministry, which brought them into contact with the Homophile community, including Phyllis Lyon and Dell Martin, who were active practicing Christians. During the 1970s and 80s church basements would often serve as meeting spaces for nascent groups working in support of homosexual rights.
Relating to the community of the Tenderloin, and to the queer concept of Street Church, the group is looking forward to the publication of Joseph Plaster’s Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin by Duke University Press in March 2023.
Lastly, the present of the Goddess Oshun mural on the T&T building was pointed out. It was painted here when the Haight-Asbury Free Clinic occupied the building and has not been removed.
