ain little more than a generation before that empire disintegrated. That colonization was driven by a mixture of defensive concerns and personal ambitions, but it introduced the first ethnic issue into California politics.
But the colonization was carried out through the mission system, which was designed not to simply remove the Indians, as was the practice in English colonization, but to integrate them into society, albeit at the lower end of a highly stratified social pyramid. This process never worked in practice, however, at least not in California; the Mission Indians were torn out of their own culture without being effectively brought into the new one. Broken and demoralized, they largely died out by the time the missi
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