Source C

Paseo: A Way to Connect to Ancestral Homelands

Introduction

Paseo was a Spanish system at multiple missions that allowed Native people to leave the missions for around two weeks at a time, for a maximum of ten weeks per year. The paseo system changed depending on the missionaries in charge. Some Spanish priests were strict about the rules of paseo and did not allow visits as often or at all. In comparison, other priests were less strict and allowed Native people to visit their home villages more regularly. Native families and communities separated into different missions may not have been allowed to visit their villages at the same time or as frequently. Some Native people were taken to missions over a hundred miles from their home villages and were not able to use paseo to visit their .

Despite these challenges, historians have found hundreds of examples of Native people who left the missions to die in their ancestral villages. Some baptized Native Californians also timed their paseos with childbirth and marriage ceremonies. In 1816, German navigator Otto von Kotzebue was on a scientific around the world on the Russian ship Rurik. While stopped in San Francisco, he recorded observations in his diary and included an eye-witness account of Native peoples leaving on paseo from Mission Dolores.

Source

Twice in the year they receive permission to return to their native homes. This short time is the happiest period of their existence; and I myself have seen them going home in crowds, with loud rejoicings.¹

—Otto von Kotzebue, German navigator

Source Analysis Questions

Why do you think some Native people chose to use paseo to marry, give birth, and/or die in their ancestral homelands?
For what other reasons do you think Native people would want to return to their villages and ancestral homelands?

Learn More

Father Junipero Serra founded Mission San Francisco de Asís, also called Mission Dolores, in October 1776 in territory, present-day San Francisco. This image shows Mission Dolores ca. 1885.

Mission Dolores, San Francisco., Photographs of the California Missions by William Henry Jackson, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California photCL 444 (9)

Lithograph of Mission Dolores, ca. 1850.

Division of Cultural and Community Life, National Museum of American History

Original 1804 mission death record from Mission San José showing the death and burial of a baptized Native Californian woman, Hodorica, while on paseo.

Santa Barbara Mission Archive-Library

Map of northern California highlighting the San Francisco De Asís mission, established in 1776 in a region where Native people at the time spoke Ohlone language.

Museum Collection Connection

As described in the film Precious Cargo: California Indian Cradle Baskets and Childbirth Traditions, “Although each tribe has its own practices surrounding the use of the basket, for all, it carries more than a baby, it holds their rituals, their traditions, and their culture.”² For families going on paseo for childbirth in their Native communities, cradleboards or cradle baskets would protect and provide comfort, as well as enable a baby to travel and always be near a parent or caregiver. Cradle baskets continue to be an important part of welcoming a baby in many Native families today.

[Santa Rosa Rancheria] cradleboard and mat made of wood, tule rush, and cordage (created 1920–23), used to carry and care for infants.

Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian 12/4424

Otto Von Kotzebue, “Extract from Kotzebue’s Diary,” in The Visit of the “Rurik” to San Francisco in 1816, ed. and trans. August Mahr (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1932), 329.

Strauss, Terry, dir. Precious Cargo: California Indian Cradle Baskets and Childbirth Traditions. Marin, CA: Marin Museum of the American Indian, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2004. DVD.