Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir is a mixed-genre book by Deborah Miranda published by Heyday Books in 2013. The book is part tribal history of the California Mission Indians and part family memoir. It combines different media and genres including oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, poems, and personal reflection to narrate the stories of Miranda’s family, who were members of the Ohlone/Costanoan – Esselen Nation (a non-profit organization that self-identifies as a Native American tribe), along with the experiences of California Indigenous people from the time of the Spanish missions into the present.
Plot
The memoir’s structure is a Native epistemology that tells a narrative with emphasis on relationships and a circulatory format. Following a loosely chronological order, the book begins in 1770 with the Spanish building a string of missions along the California coast. Through mimicking the “Mission project” as deployed in the California school curriculum and editing excerpts from a coloring book, Miranda recontextualizes how California Missions and American history are taught in schools. She also pulls from her mother’s extensive genealogy records and her grandfather’s cassette tapes in order to tell the stories of her own family.
Background
During her 10-month sabbatical from Washington and Lee University and after the rediscovery of her grandfather Tom Miranda’s tapes, Miranda began writing her tribal memoir in 2007-2008 while she was back in her home state of California. During this time, Miranda began to research the California Missions and her own family histories, recognizing that these stories were not separate but rather intertwined. As Miranda notes in an interview with Donna Miscolta, “California Indian history is brutal. I learned the realities of it from my father. The academic knowledge came later. And they were the same thing.” In an interview Miranda expresses her inspiration with bringing together the pieces of her story: “Eventually, I remembered Gloria Anzaldua talking about how a mosaic is what you make out of broken pieces, and suddenly, it made sense: I couldn’t ‘reconstruct’ our culture, but I could gather what pieces I could find and try to create something new out of it.”
Major themes
Intervening with the Mission Mythology
According to Lisa Udel, “Miranda works to counter pre-vailing narratives about Native people still evident in contemporary American culture—such as the California school curriculum’s fourth-grade ‘mission project’” Miranda demonstrates how “the Mission Unit” promotes imperialist and racist ideologies, rather than portray an accurate history of California Missions. Miranda combats these overarching mythologies by “writing a tribalography that challenges the official story.” According to Choctaw author LeAnne Howe, who developed the term, tribalography refers to a rhetorical style that Native people use as an “eloquent act of unification.”
In one passage, Miranda recounts her visit to Mission Doloras. During her visit, she meets a mother and her daughter, who are there for the daughter’s Mission Project. In response to a remark about California Natives existence, Miranda reveals that she is a member of the Ohlone/Costanoa Esselen Nation. Miranda focuses on the daughter, recounting that, “Her face drained, her body went stiff, and she stared at me as if I had risen, an Indigenous skeleton clad in decrepit rags, from beneath the clay bricks of the courtyard.” Regarding this story, Shanae A. Martinez notes that, “Miranda's living presence intervenes in the Mission Mythology, which denies the existence of any living Mission Indians and in effect denies their claims to land...she [] epitomizes the process by which settler-colonial metanarratives are institutionally authorized and internalized.”
The power of storytelling
As several critics note, the memoir demonstrates the power of stories and storytelling as vehicles for Indigenous people’s histories and resistance. In an interview about the memoir Miranda states, “Story is the great healer—of people, of histories, of imbalance.” Lauren Furlan explains how storytelling as a form of historical retelling when she states that “Miranda makes her ancestor’s storytelling a valid mode of Indigenous history-keeping and history-telling, demonstrating that stories of Indigenous life are history in the same way that official records are history.”