Surviving Catastrophe: Traveling with Coyote in Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

In her formally compelling and complex book, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), Esselen and Chumash writer Deborah Miranda negotiates centuries of violent colonial entanglements in the space we now know as California and reimagines dominant narratives of California Indian erasure to assert their (and her) survival. This work is daunting: California histories refuse easy consumption, and thus the forms and storytelling modes required to map the landscape of colonial aftermath, as well as Indigenous resurgence, are varied and shifting. As readers entering into this kind of formal, historical, and emotional complexity, it can be helpful to have a guide. One possible way to navigate Bad Indians is to follow one of the figures who recurs throughout it: Coyote. This essay asks: what happens when we follow Coyote through the book? What might Coyote have to teach us? What can we learn about Miranda’s project by noticing how Coyote moves, plays, and creates pathways through the book? What does he make visible that was invisible before attending to him? Understanding the creation story of the Esselen world and Coyote as one of the Creators helps.

At the beginning of the world, a catastrophic flood caused the Costanoan Ohlone First Beings—Eagle, Coyote, and Hummingbird—to flee their homelands in what is now known as Monterey, California and seek sanctuary on a nearby mountain peak to wait for the waters to recede. After a time, Eagle sent Coyote down to see whether it was safe to return home. Coyote returned to inform Eagle and Hummingbird that the waters had receded and that it was safe to return home. In gratitude for the risk Coyote took to investigate their homelands, Eagle gave Coyote a wife and instructed him to begin the crucial work of raising the people back up again.

Shared with University of California, Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1907 by two Carmel Mission women, Jacinta Gonzalez and Maria Viviena Soto, this creation narrative is a remarkable story of “rebirth and regeneration, one that recounts how the First People were brought to the brink of destruction yet survived to re-people their land” (Hackel 16). Collectively, the Coyote stories gathered by Kroeber construct a fragmented creation narrative about both hardship and regeneration for the Carmel Mission peoples, a story of “setbacks, false starts, doubts, and departures, all on the way to recovery” (Hackel 16). As Gonzalez and Soto share, Coyote’s five children became the founders of the five Costanoan tribes in the Monterey region, one of which is the federally-recognized Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen tribe to which Miranda belongs.

Like the origin story, Miranda’s 2013 innovative mixed-media, mixed-genre memoir centers catastrophe as a central event. That is, the “twin evils” of colonization in California: Spanish Missionization and the subsequent California Gold Rush that brings her people to the brink of destruction (Miranda, Indian Cartography ix). When the Spanish arrived in what is now California in 1769 and established twenty-one missions along the Pacific coast between San Diego and San Francisco, the world as coastal California Indian communities knew it ended, submerged in the first of what would become multiple waves of violent settler colonialism between 1769 and 1848 and their enduring effects through time. As California mission historian Steven Hackel explains, “Unlike the ocean’s waters, whose gradual ascent in the Early Period had afforded the Indians of Monterey an incremental adaptation over generations, these agents of change flooded in, often unseen, if not wholly unanticipated, and so brought the Children of Coyote to the brink of destruction” (26). Settler notions of progress, education, and civilization disrupted traditional ways of living, dislocated hundreds of thousands from their homes, and enforced new forms of religious worship under penalty of punishment. Settler colonial structures in California were designed with one purpose in mind: the total eradication of California’s Indigenous peoples. And in just under one hundred years they nearly succeeded. California’s Native population fell from over 150,000 to barely 15,000 by the end of the nineteenth century.

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