As Pope Francis plans to canonize ‘the evangeliser of the west’, descendants of those who first encountered the missionary recall a culture lost to violenceA story about conquest, religion and the Americas, central to a founding myth of California, will end this year with the pope bestowing sainthood on a man many see as guilty of “slavery” and “violent evangelism”.Pope Francis announced last week that he plans to canonize Junipero Serra, “the evangelizer of west in the United States” and a fellow Franciscan, in a ceremony in Washington this fall, officially making the 18th-century missionary a saint.