An 1886 painting by Carl von Perbandt shows a Native American camp in California. LETTER FROM THE BAY AREA CALIFORNIA'S COASTAL HOMELANDS How Native Americans defied Spanish missionaries and preserved their way of life by Andrew Curry I n the shade of a ground-floor parking deck inside a campus garage, Santa Clara University archaeologist Lee Panich points out a dark rectangle etched into the gray concrete surface. It marks the foundation of an adobe structure, one of the few physical reminders of a part of California history usually left out of the books. archaeology.org Between 1777 and 1833, what is today the city of Santa Clara was the site of a Spanish missionary outpost. Home to a few Franciscan friars, a handful of Spanish soldiers, and hundreds of Indigenous Californians, it was one of a string of missions that extended the reach of the Spanish Empire nearly 2,000 miles north of Mexico City in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 2012, construction work prompted the university to dig up an area the size of a city block a few hundred yards from the campus' missionstyle church, built in 1926 after a fire destroyed the original. Historical records showed that many of the mis55http://www.archaeology.org