Intervening in the Archive: Women-Water Alliances, Narrative Agency, and Reconstructing Indigenous Space in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

The affirmation “California is a story. California is many stories” opens Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, in which Miranda pries California—both the story and the geography—from the hands of Franciscan missionaries and their settler-colonial successors (xi). Of the many stories that make up the geography now known as the state of California, narratives about water remain prevalent. This analysis pivots upon the voice of the Río Carmelo, whose agency is channeled through Miranda and the Indigenous women she relies on for their long-standing relationships with the water. It embraces Waziyatawin’s assertion that “complete decolonization is a necessary end goal in a peaceful and just society,” and it requires us to “rethink our ways of being and interacting in this world to create a sustainable, healthy, and peaceful co-existence with one another and with the natural world” (13, emphasis added). Furthermore, if we apply Doreen Massey’s conceptualization of space to Miranda’s Río Carmelo context by accepting that space is (1) “the product of interrelations,” (2) “constituted through interactions . . . in which distinct trajectories coexist,” and (3) “always in the process of being made,” then narratives that detail long-standing interrelationships between Indigenous Californians and their ancestral lands have the power to reaffirm the Río Carmelo as Indigenous space (9). In my analysis of this multi-genre text, I examine how Bad Indians intervenes in the archival plethora of narratives used to justify settler-colonial land claims in order to “[overturn] the institutions, systems, and ideologies of colonialism that continue to affect every aspect of Indigenous life” (Waziyatawin 13). In short, I argue that Bad Indians uses the archive—built out of exploitative settler-colonial research methodologies—against itself in an effort to restore Indigenous rights to the Río Carmelo.

While Bad Indians is labeled a memoir, its subtitle defies generic classifications by expanding the scope of the text beyond the individual to include tribal relationships. By its namesake, a tribal memoir must be polyvocal. As a tribal memoir, Miranda’s text also functions as a “tribalography,” according to Choctaw scholar LeAnne Howe’s definition of such as a “rhetorical space” in which “Native people created narratives that were histories and stories with the power to transform” (118). Howe explains that stories bind cultures together around shared attitudes, and thus storytelling, regardless of genre, is “a performance of those beliefs, a living theater” (121, 123). Bad Indians contains a mosaic of voices from disparate sources that form a storied landscape composed of written and oral testimonies, poetry, essays, government documents, BIA forms, ethnographer’s fieldnotes, photographs, family stories, newspaper articles, and the diaries of imperialist explorers and Franciscan priests. These sources comprise the archive upon which Miranda draws to construct a tribal memoir that performs the decolonization of the Río Carmelo.

In the introduction, Miranda states that her purpose for writing Bad Indians is “to create a space where voices can speak after long and often violently imposed silence” (xx). While the sources listed above contain the voices of those who impose oppressive silence and those who were oppressed by that silence, Miranda juxtaposes them to demonstrate the broader discursive entanglements behind settler colonialism that demand restitution. In many instances, the narratives of settler colonialists need only be present, since they proudly declare their own commitments to injustice. Yet it is Miranda’s attuned archival research that has excavated the voices of the “Bad Indians” resisting settler colonialism and seeking justice through the return of their ancestral lands. By writing a tribalography that challenges the official story, Miranda changes the script of settler colonialism in California mission history for future generations.

Throughout this project I use the term intervenes according to Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s description of intervening as one of twenty-five Indigenous projects that utilize decolonial research methodologies. As an Indigenous project, “[i]ntervening takes action research to mean literally the process of being proactive and of becoming involved as an interested worker for...