Historic American Buildings Survey, and Roger Sturtevant. Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, First & Spain Streets, Sonoma, Sonoma County, CA. 1934. Photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/resource/hhh.ca1118.photos/?sp=1.
Students begin by analyzing the black-and-white image of Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, focusing on its simple architecture and public-facing façade. Through guided discussion, students explore how the physical preservation of the mission might obscure or reinterpret its colonial history. They then read selected stories from Jaime de Angulo’s Indian Tales, which offer an Indigenous-centered view of California landscapes. Students reflect in writing on how de Angulo’s imaginative folktales offer a spiritual and cultural counternarrative to the mission system. Their final response compares the power of visual structures and oral storytelling in shaping collective memory.
Founded in 1823 by Father José Altimira, Mission San Francisco Solano was the last and only mission established under Mexican rule. It was built to extend Mexico’s northern frontier and counter Russian settlements, but it caused significant controversy among Franciscans and disrupted the lives of Native Coast Miwok and Patwin peoples through forced conversion, labor, and displacement.
Source: https://www.californiamissionsfoundation.org/mission-san-francisco-solano/
Teacher’s Overarching Question
What does the photograph of Mission San Francisco Solano reveal—and obscure—about its historical role in Sonoma’s landscape?
Supporting Questions
- How does the mission’s placement within the town square influence how viewers interpret its significance?
- What architectural features in the image communicate authority, permanence, or cultural dominance?
- What perspectives or stories are absent from this visual record, and how might those absences shape collective memory?
Extension Question
If you could pair this image with a story or oral history from a community member, what voices or perspectives would you choose and why?
ELA Standard
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CA RL.11-12.2: Determine two or more central ideas and analyze their development over the course of a text.
Social Studies Standard
HSS 11.3.3: Analyze how the settlement of the West affected Indigenous communities and contributed to conflict.
NCTE Standard 5
Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
- Begin with a silent visual analysis of the photograph. Students note the mission’s architecture, surroundings, and visibility in Sonoma’s landscape. Use guiding prompts to spark discussion: What role did this mission play in shaping California’s northern frontier? Who might this image serve? What’s missing from it?
- Provide historical context: explain that Mission San Francisco Solano was built in 1823 to expand Mexico’s control and to challenge Russian settlers. Emphasize the role of the Coast Miwok and Patwin peoples, who were displaced, converted, and forced to labor under the mission’s influence.
- Introduce excerpts from Indian Tales by Jaime de Angulo. These folktales, rooted in Native oral traditions, highlight animals, nature, and spirit beings as cultural carriers. Select one or two stories for close reading and group discussion. Students annotate for tone, personification of place, and moral/spiritual layers while considering: How do the stories in Indian Tales reflect a deeper, place-based knowledge of the land?
- Lead a class discussion contrasting the mission’s rigid, Eurocentric structure with de Angulo’s fluid, landscape-driven narratives. Pose the question: In what ways does storytelling serve as resistance or reclamation? and extend it to What can stories recover that history books and buildings often ignore?
- For the final activity, students compose a short reflective response that pairs a feature of the mission (e.g., the bell tower, the chapel, the fence) with a symbol or figure from Indian Tales. They should explain how this pairing reclaims the space’s deeper memory.
- As an optional creative extension, students write an original short myth or fable set in their own town, reclaiming a local site through narrative.
Highsmith, Carol M. La Purísima Mission, Lompoc, California. 2012. Photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/2013632530/.
Highsmith, Carol M. Old Mission San Juan Bautista in San Juan Bautista, a city in San Benito County, California. 2013. Photograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. https://www.loc.gov/item/2013634732/.