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Bad Indians

Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir is a mixed-genre book by Deborah Miranda published by Heyday Books in 2012. The book is part tribal history of the California Mission Indians as well as a memoir of the author's family's experiences. It combines oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, poems, and personal reflection to tell the stories of Miranda's Ohlone Costanoan Esselen family along with the experiences of California Indians during the Spanish missions and into the present.

Background

During her 10-month sabbatical from Lee University and after the rediscovery of her grandfather’s, Tom Miranda, tapes Miranda began writing her tribal memoir, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, in 2007-2008. Miranda was back in her home state, California. During this time, Miranda began to research further into California Missions and her own family histories, recognizing that these stories were not separate but rather intertwined, as Miranda notes in an interview with Donna Miscolta, “California Indian history is brutal. I learned the realities of it from my father. The academic knowledge came later. And they were the same thing.” It is from these fragmented and multi-medium exploration that Miranda was able to recreate, rather than, reconstruct her and the Esselen people’s histories and culture, “Eventually, I remembered Gloria Anzaldua talking about how a mosaic is what you make out of broken pieces, and suddenly, it made sense: I couldn’t “reconstruct” our culture, but I could gather what pieces I could find and try to create something new out of it.”

Major Themes

Intervening the Myth

The “Mission Unit,” mythologizes the California Missions by undercutting the violence and harm while perpetuating a narrative of bigotry and the erasure of California Natives Miranda argues, “the Mission Unit is all too often a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny rather than actually educational or a jumping off point for critical thinking or accurate history.” As Shanae Martinez elaborates, “Because the Mission Unit is a statewide requirement, its narrative is granted authority by the settler-colonial state government to justify its existence by erasing the violence of its becoming.” Using multiple mediums Miranda begins to combat these overarching mythologies by, “writing a tribalography that challenges the official story.” This creates a space to intervene in the dominant myths surrounding the California Missions and expresses historically unheard voices by “contain[ing] the voices of those who impose oppressive silence and those who were oppressed by that silence.”

An example of this is when Miranda recounts her visit to Mission Doloras. During her visit, she meets a mother and her daughter, who are there for the daughter’s Mission Project. After a remark that California Natives’ were no longer, Miranda reveals that she is a member of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation (). This reveal shocks both the mother and daughter; however, we are specifically drawn towards the daughter’s reaction as Miranda recounts, “Her face drained, her body went stiff, and she stared at me as if I had risen, an Indigenous skeleton clad in decrepit rags, from beneath the clay bricks of the courtyard.” This demonstrates an intervention within the Mission Mythology, as Shanae notes, “In this story, Miranda's living presence intervenes in the Mission Mythology, which denies the existence of any living Mission Indians and in effect denies their claims to land. The fourth grader she meets epitomizes the process by which settler-colonial metanarratives are institutionally authorized and internalized.”

The Power of Storytelling

Miranda emphasizes the power of story and the potentiality of storytelling as a vehicle for Indigenous people’s histories and resistance. She argues, “Story is the great healer—of people, of histories, of imbalance.” Lauren Furlan explains further on the workings of storytelling as a form of historical retelling, “Miranda makes her ancestor’s storytelling a valid mode of Indigenous history-keeping and history-telling, demonstrating that stories of Indigenous life are history in the same way that official records are history.”

An example that demonstrates the power of story and it’s potentiality is  Isabel Meadows, who is a distant relative of Miranda’s as well as an informant of John Peabody Harrington, who was an ethnologist affiliated with the Smithsonian. As Furlan notes, “Miranda suggests that Meadows preserved stories for future generations of California Indians in Harrington’s 1930s field notes—that she saw her work with Harrington as an opportunity and medium to record Indigenous narratives of ‘lived experiences’ (“They Were Tough” 377).”

One specific story that is recounted by  Meadows is of a young Indigenous woman, named Vicenta Gutierrez, who was sexually assaulted by Padre Real. In this retelling,  “Isabel tells the story very tersely, almost brutally, and emphasizes “‘the girl went running to her house, saying the Padre had grabbed her’.” This story not only counters the mythology  of missions being absent of abuse and sexual assault, but also gives us a story of resistance, “Miranda reads Meadows’s use of Vi- centa’s story as a form of community activism against ‘silence and lies.’” It works and reworks our own framework on storytelling, Furlan elaborates, “Through the vehicle of this field note we are engaged in a very Indigenous practice: that of storytelling as education, as thought-experiment, as community action to right a wrong, as resistance to representation as victim.”

Content

Genre and Sequencing

Through a variety of mediums, Bad Indian embodies both a fragmented and non-linear structure. Miranda is able to create a narrative that is “constructed by what she finds, chooses, and takes possession of: Miranda’s intentional compilation that breaks with the traditional autobiographical form. And not just the “pieces” are connected, but so too are tribal history and Miranda’s story across time and space”, pulling from her mother's and father’s extensive genealogy records and her grandfather's cassette tapes she is able to tell  the stories of her own family through the history of Missions.. The book spans decades, drawing connections between the violence shown to the Mission Indians and its effects on the interpersonal relationships Miranda experienced in her life.

Mediums

Miranda includes a variety of different mediums and sources in her memoir to reconstruct and decolonize the historical narrative of indigenous people in California and her own indigenous background. Bad Indians is composed of “part historical archive, part family history, part personal narrative, and part poetry.”

Poems

There are a total of ten poems penned by Miranda within the memoir. The first two poems, “Los Pájaros” and “Fisher of Men,” are “based on writings by Junipero Serra.” Furlan notes that Miranda took creative liberties with Serra’s writings to emphasize specific themes present throughout the memoir, like coercive sexual relations between colonizers and indigenous women and the dehumanizing treatment of indigenous people by colonizers. Through altering Serra’s accounts of indigenous people, Miranda provides colonial documents with an indigenous perspective to reclaim indigneous history.

The poem “Old News,” found in the “Bridges: Post Secularization 1836-1900” section, is written from an assortment of newspaper clippings from the 1850s, divided into five chronological sections. The language of the found texts are hostile, racist, and misogynistic, revealing the brutality indigenous peoples experienced in 1850’s California. By using newspaper clippings, Furlan states, “Miranda constructs a historical narrative through repetition” and assemblage.

Articles and Newspapers

Articles and newspapers are referenced and depicted in various formats in the memoir. The poem “Old News” is written from an assortment of newspaper excerpts from the Sacramento Union, the Sacramento Daily, the Sacramento Daily Democratic State Journal, and the San Francisco Bulletin. In the essays “The Diggers” and “Digger Belles,” Miranda incorporates an excerpt from Oscar Penn Fitzgerald’s travel book California Sketches and an image of a California State bond “for the ‘suppression of Indian hostilities’.” Another newspaper clipping titled “‘Bad Indian Goes on Rampage at Santa Ynez’” depicts an indigenous man named Juan Miranda who goes “on a rampage” after drinking some “fire water.” The subsequent poem, “Novena to Bad Indians,” serves as “guidance on how to read” the newspaper clipping through recognition that indigenous “acts of rebellion” were meant to offset “settler colonial violence.”

Essays

Much of Miranda’s memoir consists of essays regarding indigenous history in California, her personal narratives about family and indigeneity, and transcribed recordings from her grandfather’s cassette tapes.

Short Stories

Miranda’s short story “Coyote Takes a Trip” appears in the fourth section of the memoir, “Teheyapami Achiska: Home 1961-present.” “Coyote,” who is a creator in Esselen mythology.

Cartoons

There is one cartoon featured in Bad Indians titled “California Pow Wow,” by L. Frank.

Images

Miranda includes images of herself, her family, documents, indigenous people, works of art by colonizers, and one of J.P. Harrington in her memoir.

Reception

Since its release the book has received favorable reviews from Booklist and Native American author Linda Hogan, among others. Kirkus Reviews called it, "A searing indictment of the ravages of the past and a hopeful look at the courage to confront and overcome them." For the book Miranda won a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award gold medal for the Autobiography/Memoir category. Additionally, she won a 2015 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

The memoir has also received reviews from other Native female authors. Linda Hogan states that “...this book is groundbreaking not only as literature but as history” and Leslie Marmon Silko says “Miranda takes us on a journey to locate herself by way of the stories of her ancestors and others who come alive through her writing. It's such a fine book that a few words can't do it justice.” Beverly Slapin also states that “Miranda has created an achingly beautiful mosaic out of the broken shards of her people and herself.”

Further Reading

• Soldier, Rose Soza War. Review of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, by Deborah A. Miranda. Wicazo Sa Review, vol. 31 no. 2, 2016, pp. 103-106. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/663860.