Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir by Deborah A. Miranda (review)

Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen poet Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir powerfully explores the mutually constitutive relationship of stories, epistemologies, identity, and survival. Miranda’s extensive research spans the late eighteenth century to the present, examining the structures of settler-colonialism and their ongoing effects. Using diaries of priests and explorers, ethnographic field notes, the words of California Native people missionized by the Spanish and colonized by European Americans, government documents, bia forms, newspaper articles, tourist materials, photographs, ancestry charts, Indian blood quantum charts, family stories, conversation, and memory, as well as her own poetry and journals, Miranda maps the bridge between her family’s past and present. Miranda writes the book “to create a space where voices can speak after long and often violently imposed silence” and to voice “the antidote to lies” (xx). Miranda works to counter prevailing narratives about Native people still evident in contemporary American culture—such as the California school curriculum’s fourth-grade “mission project” (what Miranda calls the “Mission Fantasy Fairy Tale”), exploding the stories of nation building. In this manner, she works within the model of contemporary Native memoirists to “set the record straight” about the recording, interpretation, and analysis of historical events while surpassing that agenda in her thorough examination of what links epistemology and historiography to survival and identity that is personal and “communitist.”

Miranda structures the book in four major parts. “The End of the World: Missionization, 1776–1836,” opens with a “genealogy of violence” that traces the physical and psychological methods and effects of Spanish Catholic imperialism, from rape, forced conversion, and land theft to post-traumatic stress syndrome, poverty, and termination, noting that conquest comprises much of the inheritance of contemporary Native peoples. Miranda writes poems in the voices of both Indigenous speakers witnessing and enduring the brutalities of colonization and the friars expressing their condemnation of the Indigenous cultures they attempt to control and disable. Miranda describes—accompanied by illustrations—the various methods and implements of “discipline” (whipping with a cat-o’-nine-tails or beating with a cudgel, etc.) employed by the friars using Native labor to build the missions. Miranda characterizes California missions as “massive conversion factor[ies] … constructed of flesh, bones, blood, grief” (16). In this scenario, the Native neophytes/workers are exploited and depleted as commodities in the colonial enterprise.

Miranda also uses 1935 documents from ethnographer J. P. Harrington and his chief informant, Isabel Meadows—an ancestor of Miranda’s—to discuss the high rate of sexual violence against Native women by non-Native men. Meadows forcefully recounts the story of a priest who had raped a young Indian woman, Vicenta Gutierrez, one hundred years before. Miranda addresses a letter to Vicenta, praising her bravery and telling her of their shared experience as rape survivors, citing high rates of contemporary rape statistics for Native women. Miranda praises Meadows’s act of recovery, noting that Vicenta’s story works as a “precursor to modern Native literature, a stepping-stone between oral literacy and written literature” (28). Miranda reads Meadows’s use of Vicenta’s story as a form of community activism against “silence and lies.”

Throughout the “genealogy of violence” run descriptions of the physical abuse that Miranda’s father doles out to his family, especially his son. These contemporary sections alternate with documents by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mission friars admonishing Native parents to avoid leniency with their children and employ harsh discipline. Miranda draws a direct line between the child abuse she witnesses and missionization, positing both child abuse and sexual violence as byproducts of settler colonialism (34).

“Bridges: Post-secularization, 1836–1900,” continues Miranda’s detailed family lineage while providing a broader historical context. Looking at negative representations of California tribes in nineteenth-century photographs, postcards, and newspaper articles and charting the literal enslavement of California Indian women and children through the use of bounties, Miranda moves up to the twentieth century when inaccurate census data led the federal government...