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The de Saisset’s new exhibit challenges California Mission-era narratives

As the oldest institution of higher education in California, �Ӱ���Ƶ carries a history inseparable from the land it sits on. The University grew around Mission Santa Clara de Asís, a site shaped by colonialism and Indigenous endurance. This painful and complex history continues to inspire , memorial projects, and partnerships with the local Muwekma Ohlone tribe, who trace their ancestry to the Missions Santa Clara, San Jose, and Dolores.

This work of examining this land’s history continues through Puerto Rican artist Monica Rodriguez’s new exhibition at Santa Clara’s de Saisset Museum: “Californiana” (on display through December 12, 2025). The multimedia exhibit invites visitors to navigate a layered encounter with the land and legacy of California’s Mission era.

From bells cast in adobe materials to idyllic historical art, the exhibition invites visitors to reconsider what they know about the Mission period. Curated by de Saisset Director and Chief Curator Ciara Ennis, this exhibition is part of a new series of interdisciplinary and transhistorical projects, including “Maya Gurantz: The Plague Archives” and “Julia Haft-Candell: The Infinite Library.”

“These exhibitions extend far beyond the Museum’s walls in terms of their content and dialogue with real-world issues. The shows themselves function as portals bringing the past together with the present as a way of envisioning the future,” explains Ennis.

Through a series of faculty-guided tours of “Californiana,” English Professor Amy Lueck, English Assistant Professor and Seneca Cayuga Nation member Jessica Young, and anthropology Professor Lee Panich offered their own discipline-specific interpretations across the exhibition.

Their reflections below reveal not one story, but many, adds Ennis. They invite viewers to interrogate the visual, spatial, textual, and material systems that produced the California Mission myth and to imagine new futures for the histories held on this land.

The Adobe Bells

Amy Lueck: When you walk in, the bells immediately interrupt your instinct to move in a straight line. Their placement forces your body to curve with the installation. That interruption matters—it breaks the colonial impulse toward a direct, linear trajectory. Movement becomes rhetorical. The space is persuading you to slow down, to question the path you assume is natural.

Jessica Young: These bells were so central to Mission life and timekeeping. I had this moment last year where I realized I had started embodying that. Every Tuesday and Thursday I had a class at 12:10. So, when the bells at the Mission Church rang at noon, I would close my laptop, gather my things, and walk to class. It became automatic. And then I thought—what would that sound have felt like for Indigenous people here under the Mission system? For them, the bells weren’t gentle reminders. They structured the entire day. They were a call to pray, a call to labor, a call to shift tasks. My own reaction made me think about the embodied call to labor that the bells represented historically.

And in this exhibit, even their material speaks to this labor. Making adobe is backbreaking work. You need the right dirt, you haul water long distances, you stomp the mixture with your feet, you make frames, you mold 60-pound bricks, you carry them to dry. So when I see those bells, I don’t just see an object. I see hours and hours of embodied labor—labor Indigenous people performed in the heat, under pressure, under surveillance.

Lee Panich: For me, these adobe bells say something about both the past and the future. Archaeologists will sometimes crack open old adobe bricks and find seeds of native plants that no longer exist in the wild. So, in that way, adobe preserves ecological memory. Then, turning the adobe bells upside down and planting native species inside them speaks to Indigenous futurities. It’s literally flipping a colonial symbol on its head, making it inoperable, and turning it into something living. It reminds me of that phrase: “They tried to bury us, but didn’t know we were seeds.”

The Oil Painting

Amy Lueck: The pastel sky, the tidy grounds, the orderly buildings—these are rhetorical choices. The composition is designed to evoke nostalgia. And nostalgia is political; it shapes what we choose to remember and forget.

Lee Panich: In the original 1842 sketch to the right of this painting, you see uneven land—hummocks, water channels, textured terrain—even the adobe residences of Native people. This later reimagining of the Mission landscape flattens everything. It’s sanitized. That transformation is intentional; it’s part of the romanticization that fueled 20th-century tourism, including along the El Camino Real route. Paintings like this became the source material for postcards, guidebooks, and eventually the bells along Highway 101

Jessica Young: This is the Mission myth Californians grow up with—beautiful, harmonious, serene. Indigenous people, if they appear at all, are small and peripheral—like here, in the cart. They become a footnote in their own story.

When I was growing up near Mission Dolores in San Francisco, images like these were the curriculum. We were taught a sanitized history where Native people had already vanished. Teachers would literally say, “Indians are extinct.” And there I was—an Indigenous kid—treated as the exception, not the evidence that the narrative was wrong.

Population and Production Tables

Lee Panich: These tables are administrative documents for secular officials. You can see categories for men, women, boys, girls, then livestock and wheat harvests. They’re all right next to each other. When you lay it out visually across a wall, it becomes clear how Indigenous lives were quantified in the same system as cattle and crops.

Amy Lueck: Placing these tables beside romanticized paintings and guidebook frontispieces is rhetorically brilliant. The idealized imagery collapses when you see the same institution quantifying people like resources.

Jessica Young: In a lot of these records, Indigenous people appear in diminishing numbers. That’s part of the “extinction narrative” we were all taught—this idea that Native people just faded away. But these documents show something else: people being counted, categorized, controlled. That’s not disappearance—that’s bureaucracy.

Mission Maps and Floorplans

Amy Lueck: Looking at these vinyl maps across the walls—these are rhetorical technologies of colonialism. Maps aren’t neutral. They produce the space we think we’re looking at. They decide what we see, how we name a place, and how we imagine ourselves moving through it.

Lee Panich: Most people today see only the church and the quadrangle of buildings around it as ”the Mission.” But these maps show tanning vats, tallow-rendering areas, workshops, and Native neighborhoods. They convey the Missions as major economic engines of the colony.

Jessica Young: I live in faculty housing, which was built in the area where the rancherías once were, labelled here simply as “Indian villages.” So when I get home, tired from work, I think about how—beneath my feet—200 years ago, Indigenous people living here under the Mission system would have been doing many of the same practices I’m doing now, like cooking and tending to children, and doing them while probably being more tired than me.

Lee has talked about how they cultivated eagles for their feathers and maintained cultural traditions, and when doing craft projects with my kid, I think about how I’m also maintaining my own cultural practices with my child. So, whether I’m at home or at work, I’m constantly thinking about embodiment, which to me, means thinking consciously about how I’m interacting with the Mission Indians and imagining what their lives would have been like in the space I am currently occupying. My body feels it. That’s part of the landscape my child is growing up in, so that responsibility lives with me.