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

Deborah Miranda is a poet and enrolled tribal member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation of California and of Chumash and Jewish ancestry. She is a professor of English at Washington and Lee University and winner of the PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Literary Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold Medal for Autobiography/Memoir. The book is divided into four sections: The End of the World: Missionization, 1776–1836; Bridges: Post-Secularization, 1836–1900; The Light from the Carrissa Plains: Reinvention, 1900–1961; Teheyapami Achiska: Home, 1961–present. She opens her beautiful, power-fully honest, lyrical, and deeply personal memoir, Bad Indians, with detailing the importance of story: "Story is the most powerful force in the world—in our world, maybe in all worlds. Story is culture" (xvi). Miranda identifies that her primary motivation in writing this book is to share these stories as her "chosen weapon" to challenge the mission myth.

For generations, California children, Indian and non-Indian, were taught limited characterizations about California Indians: inevitable conquest, cultural inferiority, and eventual disappearance. Miranda shares her life and family stories by framing them within the historical experiences and centering them within Catholic missionization, or as many California Indians refer to it, "the end of the world." Using this lens, she weaves short essays, poetry, oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, and photographs, among additional material, "to create a space where voices can speak after long and often violently imposed silence" (xx).

Miranda focuses her work on California missions and the fourth grade mission unit curriculum. Found in California's public schools, the mission unit is generally the first exposure California students have to the topic of American Indians. One of the most common assignments is for young California students to build mission dioramas, usually made of sugar cubes. Generally, this sugarcoated building has been the primary exposure to the mission myth for generations of California students. Through careful evaluation of the missionization era, 1769 to 1833, Miranda guides readers through the historical realities and highlights the inconsistencies and falsehoods perpetuated by the curriculum.

In preparation of her memoir, Miranda visited the twenty-one missions along coastal California on El Camino Real (the Royal Road, or the King's Highway), in order to reveal their historical legacy. She also points out the economic engine the mission unit has created, as most missions have an area dedicated to the mission project and market prepackaged mission models, CDs, coloring books, among other material for sale. With the use of searing satire, she unpacks the mission unit through creating a postcolonial thought experiment on Carmel Mission Project by creating a student mission handout with parallel handouts on the Birmingham Plantation Project and Dachau Concentration Camp Project. Perhaps shocking to some readers, her purpose is to highlight the double standard when it comes to curriculum on American Indians. As she rhetorically asks, "Can you imagine teaching about slavery in the South while simultaneously requiring each child to lovingly construct a plantation model, complete with happy darkies in the fields, white masters, overseers with whips, and human auctions?" (xvii).

Her poetry and short stories offers context to the violence permeating the foundation of the state of California. From the state-sponsored genocide with voluntary militia to the 1850 "Act for the Government and Protection of the Indians," Miranda explores themes such as the derogatory term "digger" and the dehumanization of California Indians in the early field of anthropology. These topics illustrate what she calls the "genealogy of violence" in California and the legacy of historical trauma within California Indian communities. She asks readers to recognize the history that they may not have learned about in classrooms. Additionally, this book is a must read in light of the controversial decision of Pope Francis to canonize Junipero Serra, the founder of California missions, during his visit to the United States in the fall of 2015. In part, Miranda's book represents a tradition of California Indians speaking out against the mission...