Flutterby™! : Confronting Colonialism and Genocide

Native America: A History — Confronting Colonialism and Genocide in Father Serra’s Town

Three of the four middle schools in the Ventura Unified School District–Balboa, DeAnza, and Cabrillo–are named after Spanish explorers of the Pacific. The “Serra Cross” stands above the city in a small park that still bears the scars of the horrifying fires of late 2018. An inscription reads that the cross was “restored September 9, 1912, by the Alice Bartlett Club of San Buenaventura . . . to take the place of the mission cross erected on this spot by Franciscan Missionary Padre Junipero Serra, 1782.” Another plaque, placed on the same spot in 1982, commemorates the life of Serra “who closed the labor of his useful life with the founding of the Mission” two hundred years before. That mission still stands below the cross, down a winding and twisted road.