This article deals with the Chumash people, their history, as well as colonization and coercion during the mission period in California. In this article, the authors examine a complex paper on the missionization of the Chumash Indians of the California Coast published in American Anthropologist by Daniel O. Larson, John R. Johnson, and Joel C. Michaelson (1994). Their intent is not to denigrate the authors of that article, but to explore the implications of such explanations, reexamine some of the data on which they are based, and present ethnohistorical data that indict Spanish colonialism as the primary cause of the wrenching cultural changes that afflicted the Chumash between about AD 1542 and AD 1834. The authors also talk about environmental change, risk and missionization. (Contains 1 table and 35 notes.)