I spent some time at a forced labor camp one weekend. It was a bizarrely pleasant trip.

My daughter, along with all the other fourth graders in California, has to do a report on one of the missions, and build a model out of cardboard and lasagna noodles. Or maybe glue and sugar cubes. She chose Santa Cruz, because she has an older brother who lives there, and doing research gave us an excuse to visit him.

We got there a little before the mission buildings opened on Saturday morning, and after taking a few photographs, and talking to a nice priest, who gave my daughter several pamphlets about the mission, we sat on a bench in front of the museum, watching a large and beautiful family gather in front of the chapel next door for a baptism, welcoming a child into the faith.

The faith that ran the forced labor camp.

In 1812, Costanoan Indians killed one of the padres at this mission. Father Andres Quintana was contemptuous of the native people and cruel. When he announced that he would be using a new metal-tipped whip to punish intransigent laborers, they killed him, then smashed his testicles. It was a particularly grisly death, but not an unusual one:

Many Mission Indians viewed the padres as powerful witches who could only be neutralized by assassination. Consequently, several assassinations occurred. At Mission San Miguel in the year of 1801 three padres were poisoned, one of whom died as a result. Four years later another San Miguel Yokut male attempted to stone a padre to death,

In 1804, a San Diego Padre was poisoned by his personal cook. Costanoan Indians at Mission Santa Cruz, in 1812, killed a padre for introducing a new instrument of torture which he unwisely announced he planned to use on some luckless neophytes awaiting a beating. Few contemporary Americans know of the widespread armed revolts precipitated by Mission Indians against colonial authorities. The Kumeyaay of San Diego launched two serious military assaults against the missionaries and their military escorts within five weeks of their arrival in 1769.

Desperate to stop an ugly pattern of sexual assaults, the Kumeyaay utterly destroyed Mission San Diego and killed the local padre in 1775. Quechan and Mohave Indians along the Colorado River to the east destroyed two missions, killed four missionaries and numerous other colonists in a spectacular uprising in 1781.

A brief reminder that when you take over a country and torture and enslave its people, they usually don't respond by showering you with rose petals. Often they break your balls. Sometimes literally.