{"id":5374,"date":"2025-10-21T09:49:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T16:49:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/?post_type=event&#038;p=5374"},"modified":"2025-10-21T12:57:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T19:57:37","slug":"hsa-book-talk-native-alienation-spiritual-conquest-and-the-violence-of-california-missions-dr-charles-sepulveda","status":"publish","type":"event","link":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/events\/hsa-book-talk-native-alienation-spiritual-conquest-and-the-violence-of-california-missions-dr-charles-sepulveda\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Talk with Dr. Charles Sepulveda\u2013 \u201cNative Alienation: Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions\u201c"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Focusing on the region currently called California, ethnic studies professor Charles Sepulveda examines the ghosts of missionization, colonization and dispossession\u2014the \u201cafterlife\u201d of violation. No longer shrouded with misnomers like \u201cprogress\u201d or \u201creligious conversion,\u201d he calls out their true name: genocide and enslavement, enacted with unimaginable violence by Spanish priests and soldiers in the name of spiritual and physical possession. Sepulveda points out that while resistance, survival and empowerment run like a thread through California Indian history, it has come with a price: whatever empowerment we gain, we cannot walk away as if unscathed by such a history, but must carry it with us, acknowledging what has been irreparably lost and what must be reinvented. To ignore it is to ignore colonization, which continues to dispossess California Indians of our sovereignty and human-land relationships.<\/p>\n<h2>Speaker<\/h2>\n<p>Charles Sepulveda studies California Indian histories with a focus on the mission system\u2019s enslavement of Native peoples and their resistance. He earned his PhD in ethnic studies at UCR and held previous appointments at Cal Poly Pomona and the University of Utah. He received the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples\u2019 Land Rematriation Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. Sepulveda\u2019s first book, <em>Native Alienation: Spiritual Conquest and the Violence of California Missions,<\/em> was published by the University of Washington Press in 2024. His article, \u201cOur Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility,\u201d offered guests the opportunity to radically alter their relations to place. Sepulveda is a board member of the Acjachemen Tongva Land Conservancy, the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, and Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Focusing on the region currently called California, ethnic studies professor Charles Sepulveda examines the ghosts of missionization, colonization and dispossession\u2014the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":185,"featured_media":5376,"template":"","class_list":["post-5374","event","type-event","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","event-categories-home-feed","event-categories-lecture-tccs-feed"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event\/5374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/event"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}