The Archives of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians

Tell the lies now and maybe lateryour descendants will digfor the truth in libraries,field notes, museums,wax cylinder recordings,newspaper reports of massacresand relocations, clues you left behindwhen you forgotto lielie lie lie.

—Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

In the poem “Lies My Ancestors Told for Me,” Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen and Chumash) evokes the colonial archive, the collection of historical documents and materials that informs her 2013 memoir, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, of which this poem is part. Significantly, Miranda suggests here that “truth” can be found in institutional archives, among the “lies” told in the interest of survival: “and when you tell that lie/tell it in Spanish,” “Give your children/Spanish names,” “Don’t tell them/you still speak Chumash/with their mother” (40). Throughout this complex memoir, Miranda demonstrates the need to look to many sources—and to read them critically—to find these “clues” that help her reconstruct her story of self and the story of her people, a story of genocide at the hands of the Spanish missionaries and later those of the United States.¹ “Constructing this book has been hard,” she writes in the book’s introduction, “listening to those stories seep out old government documents, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) forms, field notes, the diaries of explorers and priests, the occasional writings or testimony from Indians, family stories, photographs, newspaper articles” (xx).² But Miranda tells a different story, one that she centers around the Esselen word xu-lin (meaning to reclaim, return, recover),³ making her “tribal memoir” simultaneously an act of discovery and recovery, a testimony, a tribal genealogy, a reclamation, and a historical reconstruction.⁴ The memoir also functions as a quest to find her ancestors’ voices in the archives—those telling the “lies” in the poem cited above.⁵ Miranda is not the first Indigenous author to go to the archives to reconstruct and write the history of her people, but what makes this text unique and compelling is how she calls attention to and interprets the colonial record and how she positions Indigenous archives and knowledge.

In this book, Miranda not only reclaims or recovers archival materials, but she also demonstrates how to read them, how to translate them from an Indigenous perspective, and how to read them in tandem with Indigenous sources and stories. In so doing, Miranda challenges the colonial archive as the sole keeper of knowledge and calls attention to the gaps in and the narrative power of the historical record, enacting what literary scholar Emily Lederman has called “archival sovereignty”—work that both “destabiliz[es]” and “repurpose[es]” colonial archival documents, “by positioning the US colonial record within an Indigenous frame” (64; 65).⁶ Similarly, in Red Ink, literary scholar Drew Lopenzina theorizes about an alternate Indigenous archive, what he terms a “longhouse of the archive,” one that is grounded in Native epistemologies, and about how archival recovery means “making a space for a [historical] narrative” that has been “unwitnessed” (18; 24).⁷ The Indigenous archives movement, which began in earnest with Vine Deloria, Jr.’s 1978 report entitled The Right to Know, first focused on Indigenous peoples’ access to knowledge in institutional archives.⁸ Debates over archives continue into the present, as scholars like Marlene Manoff, Randall Jimerson, and Ann Stoler point to the bias of archives and the knowledge they represent, suggesting that we read them not solely for historical accuracy but to instead think about the gaps and misrepresentations, issues of provenance and access (including how to limit outsider access to sensitive Indigenous knowledge in these archives), cataloguing, user groups, digital surrogates and repatriation, and how, why, and by whom the collections were constructed.⁹ Read within the context of these debates, Bad Indians offers a method of interpreting what the author finds in the contested space of the colonial archive, which she supplements with family and personal archives and her own autobiographical account to provide a counternarrative that “makes space” for an alternate Indigenous history—similar to the process...