Lee M. Panich

Portrait of Lee M. Panich

Photo: Santa Clara University

Fay Boyle Professor of Anthropology, Santa Clara University

The burial registers of Mission Santa Clara de Asís, today at the heart of the Santa Clara University campus, record the names of more than 7,600 Native people. Archaeologist Lee M. Panich has devoted much of his career to making sure their lives, and the lives of their Muwekma Ohlone descendants, are no longer left out of the story told there.

Background

Panich is the Fay Boyle Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Santa Clara University (SCU). He has taught there since 2010 and chaired the department from 2020 to 2025. He holds a B.A. from Brown University (2001) and an M.A. (2004) and Ph.D. (2009) from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2025 he has served on the Board of Directors of the Muwekma Ohlone Preservation Foundation.

Research Focus

Panich is an archaeologist and historical anthropologist. He combines archaeological, ethnographic, and archival evidence to study the long-term interactions between California’s Indigenous peoples and colonial institutions, especially the missions. His central theme is persistence: how Native people kept their communities, practices, and ties to their homelands alive under colonial rule. His book Narratives of Persistence (2020) compares Indigenous experiences in Alta and Baja California. “Categorical Denial,” written with Tsim D. Schneider (American Antiquity, 2019), shows how archaeology’s own paperwork has erased Indigenous presence after 1492. He has also published widely on the Native neighborhood, burial practices, beads, and stone tools at Mission Santa Clara.

With the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe

In 2019–2020 Panich served with Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh on SCU’s Ohlone History Working Group, which assessed how the campus represents Ohlone heritage. One of the group’s highest priorities was to honor the thousands of Native people buried in the mission cemeteries. That led to a digital memorial, created by Muwekma Ohlone representatives and SCU personnel, which opened at the de Saisset Museum in autumn 2023. The memorial lists all 7,612 Native people named in the mission’s burial records. It also includes biographies written by SCU students in conversation with Muwekma Ohlone tribal youth ambassadors, along with videos of Muwekma leaders and youth. Panich has also worked with tribal representatives on a virtual Native history walking tour (2020) and the Thámien Ohlone augmented reality tour. Some of these projects were funded by grants he shares with Vice Chairwoman Monica V. Arellano and Chairwoman Nijmeh.

His research also reaches into the archives. With Gustavo Flores of San José State University, Michael Wilcox, and Monica Arellano, he has studied records such as an 1842 court document. It records Native men from Mission San José who planned a revolt against the taking of their lands, among them Zenon Patcha, father of the Muwekma ancestor Angela Colos. This research led to We Will Receive Justice (2026, with Flores), on Ohlone struggles for land and justice as the missions collapsed. Panich is also helping the Tribe transcribe J. P. Harrington’s interviews with Muwekma elders, so that the knowledge they passed down can support the revival of traditional ecological practices. In 2023 he spoke on the historical context of Muwekma federal recognition at the inaugural Native American Symposium hosted by the Tribe and SCU.

Selected Publications

  • Panich, Lee M., Monica V. Arellano, Michael Wilcox, Gustavo Flores, and Samuel Connell. 2024. “Fighting Erasure and Dispossession in the San Francisco Bay Area: Putting Archaeology to Work for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe.” Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology 3: 1394106.

  • Panich, Lee M., Gustavo Flores, Michael Wilcox, and Monica V. Arellano. 2024. “Reading Colonial Transitions: Archival Evidence and the Archaeology of Indigenous Action in Nineteenth-Century California.” American Antiquity 89(3): 495–511.

  • Panich, Lee M., and Charlene Nijmeh. 2025. “Native Heritage and the California Missions: A Collaborative Approach at Mission Santa Clara.” In Heritage and Its Missions: Contested Meanings and Constructive Appropriations, edited by Cristóbal Gnecco and Adriana Schmidt Dias, 88–111. New York: Fordham University Press.

  • Panich, Lee M., Amy J. Lueck, Lauren Baines, and Isabella ’Amne Gomez. 2025. “We Are Here Because of Them: Co-Creating a Native Cemetery Memorial at Mission Santa Clara.” The Public Historian 47(4): 91–111.

  • Panich, Lee M., and Gustavo Flores. 2026. We Will Receive Justice: Native Histories of the Collapse of the California Missions. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

  • Panich, Lee M. 2022. “Archaeology, Indigenous Erasure, and the Creation of White Public Space at the California Missions.” Journal of Social Archaeology 22(2): 149–171.

  • Panich, Lee M. 2020. Narratives of Persistence: Indigenous Negotiations of Colonialism in Alta and Baja California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

  • Panich, Lee M., and Tsim D. Schneider. 2019. “Categorical Denial: Evaluating Post-1492 Indigenous Erasure in the Paper Trail of American Archaeology.” American Antiquity 84(4): 651–668.