Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Miranda remembers the first time she wrote her name in red crayon: “Deby.” Everyone around her kept disappearing, from a father in prison to a sad and absent mother. She began to think of writing as something that might keep her from disappearing too. She compares her writing journals to “ancient petroglyphs of my Esselen and Chumash ancestors” (122), though she realizes that even those centuries-old markings can disappear over time due to weathering and other factors, and this realization convinces her that what survives are not the physical markings but the stories.

Miranda imagines how descendants might incorporate her own story into a broader mythology of what she calls “Mestiza Nation.” Throughout this five-page exercise, she refers to herself as the “girl without a mother” (123), for the mother she called “Mama” disappeared for long stretches or, when physically present, often retreated into extreme sadness. Miranda describes her white maternal grandparents: a grandmother who loved her and wanted to look after her, and a grandfather who disliked the little girl because she resembled her dark-skinned father. The grandfather wouldn’t allow the motherless girl to stay in his house. The grandmother cried and many years later begged forgiveness. Miranda then imagines the “girl without a mother” climbing for a long time until “a woman came to meet her and took her through the side of the mountain” (126). Here, Miranda’s history and mythology come together as she recalls meeting other children who looked like her in what could have been a foster home or an orphanage.

Nearly 30 years old in the late 1980s, Miranda accompanies her ailing father to the hospital, where he’s scheduled to undergo surgery. She still feels ambivalence toward the man who caused her and others so much pain. She pulls from her pocket a medallion emblazoned with the image of an angel. From his hospital bed, her father examines the medallion, declares that it belongs in a car for protection, and remembers surviving a car accident himself long ago. The medical team arrives, prepares him for surgery, and wheels him down the hallway. In the waiting area, Miranda opens a letter from a female friend, a “strong woman” and “the only other California Indian I have met,” who encourages Miranda to hear her father’s stories because they “are connected with older stories” long forgotten (132). Miranda wonders what it was about the angel on her medallion that triggered her father’s memory of the car accident in his old pink Plymouth in 1962.

Sitting in the Philadelphia airport—she doesn’t specify when—Miranda reflects on her diverse identity, the “shattering and fragmentation of California Indian communities since Contact” (135), her own tribe’s battle for formal government recognition, and the difficult or perhaps impossible task of reconstructing the tribe from what remains of it. She concludes that her people must move forward as best they can and that life would be much easier if her identity consisted of all one thing.

Miranda attends graduate school and chooses Spanish to fulfill her foreign-language requirement. She keeps a journal of her intensive summer immersion course. Each day, her thoughts wander back to the past. She wants to know, for instance, when her ancestors began thinking in Spanish, when they took Spanish names, and which Esselen word they abandoned to adopt its Spanish equivalent.

At the University of California, Berkeley, Miranda keeps another daily journal, only this one describes her participation in a weeklong Breath of Life conference, where she and others, including her half sister, Louise, spend six days discovering what survives of California Indigenous languages. Louise has already so immersed herself in the experience that she has published an Esselen-English dictionary, the first of its kind. Miranda, however, describes herself as a novice who thinks and writes well in English but doesn’t easily take to other languages. Above all, participants learn to conduct research into California Indigenous languages, for remnants are scattered across various archives. Miranda grows much closer to Louise. They begin to remember and discuss how their father, grandparents, and great-grandparents spoke, and they wonder if the family somehow blended Chumash and Esselen languages into their own unique way of speaking.

To honor her sister and fellow conference participants, Miranda composes a nine-stanza poem in Esselen. She intersperses English translations in italics following each line. Teheyapami Achiska means “Giving Honor.”

Miranda describes a group visit to Soledad, established in 1791 as the 13th of the 21 California missions. They see the mission bell still hanging. Children discover bone fragments unearthed by the bulldozing of an Indigenous graveyard. Miranda and the others “have never walked so mindfully” as they do in this place, where bits of human remains “rise up from the dirt, catch in the steel-belted tire treads of tourists, carry our ancestors out to Highway 101, [and] scatter them to the wind” (149). Some kneel and pray as they promise to return.

Miranda composes a one-page poem about the bones in the mission museum and the people they represent: “lonesome piles of sticks with no names, no tribal ID, no stories” (151).

In the book’s lengthiest section by far, Miranda focuses on her relationship with, feelings toward, and understanding of her father, from the moment he reunited with her mother over Christmas 1974 to his death in a hospice facility in 2009. Following his release from San Quentin prison, Al Miranda flew to Washington State to reunite with his ex-wife, Miranda’s mother, in part because he knew that young Miranda, now in seventh grade, was asking about him.

Miranda came to know and admire her father as an excellent carpenter, gardener, and cook. The young girl helped her father every chance she got: “I did everything I could to make him fall in love with me, too” (157). One day, her father explained to Miranda that he’d been in prison for rape, that the girl had lied about being 18 years old and then lied about the encounter not being consensual. Miranda, not yet 14, didn’t question her father’s account. Six months after their reunion, in May 1975, her father flew to Los Angeles, took his four-year-old son, Al, Jr., from the child’s mother’s apartment, and flew back to Washington State. Miranda instantly fell in love with her younger half brother.

Meanwhile, her father suddenly grew dictatorial, angry, and violent. He beat his son with a belt as punishment for behavior such as bed-wetting, and Miranda felt powerless to intervene. Her father’s rage intensified when he drank, which he often did. Miranda found ways to protect Al, Jr., such as hiding and then washing his wet bed sheets before their father could discover them. At 16, Miranda began sleeping with her high-school teacher, whom she later married as a means of escaping her situation at home.

Many years later, Miranda learned the truth about her father from her half sister, Louise, who despised their father for many reasons and thus wouldn’t even take his surname. Contrary to what he told his daughter in early 1975, Al Miranda, Sr. had gone to prison for brutally raping and beating a waitress in a restaurant parking lot after she refused his advances. This knowledge deepened Miranda’s ambivalence, the mixture of love and hatred for her father, but it also brought her to see her father as her connection to her Indigenous heritage—a heritage that included acts of brutality copied from the Spaniards and used for the purpose of self-preservation: “That was the first time I wondered if, in order to survive, we had become destroyers, like them” (172). Miranda concludes this section with reminiscences of a moment, several weeks after her father’s death, when she waded into the water and spotted a group of dolphins. She asked the dolphins to take his spirit and heal it. This felt like forgiveness.

Miranda composes a poem for her father. Each line begins with the same phrase: “I need a song.” The second page of this two-page section features a photo of Al Miranda, Sr. holding his baby daughter, Deborah Miranda, at Santa Monica Beach, circa 1963. He’s squatting down and smiling. She sits on his knee and points toward the water.

This creative story depicts “Coyote,” a fictional character whom Miranda describes only as male, boarding a bus in rainy Venice Beach, California, and heading for New Mexico. On the bus, he spots three elderly women. The one in the middle, described only as an “Indigenous woman,” appears “smooth-skinned” and has strong hands. Something about this woman leaves Coyote transfixed. When he finally moves to get off the bus, he passes in front of the three women, but the bus driver brakes to a sudden stop, and Coyote’s baggy pants briefly fall off his hips, revealing everything. Coyote recovers as best he can. From outside the bus, he looks up and realizes that the old Indigenous “woman” is actually an old man dressed as a woman, and he appears to like what he saw. At the beginning, near the middle, and toward the end of this imaginary tale, Miranda includes excerpts from three historical accounts, dated 1775, 1846, and 1777, respectively. Each account, from a Spanish source, refers to Indigenous men who dressed as women, were called joyas (“jewels”) by their people, and were treated as females.

Miranda presents a fourth-grade “Carmel Mission Project” featuring a letter to parents and 10 accompanying questions for students. She then presents a “Birmingham Plantation Project” and a “Dachau Concentration Camp Project,” each of which includes identical letters to parents and accompanying questions in which only the relevant names and contexts have been changed.

This cartoon is attributed to “L. Frank.” It features what appears to be a coyote in a bow tie sitting at a table and selling “Mission Tours” while “Mission Art” hangs on the wall and sells for $29.95. Aside from the price listing, all of the text appears backward, as if reflected in a mirror.

This concluding section focuses on stories, origins, and connections to ancient lands. Miranda returns to her grandfather Tom’s story about “The Light from the Carrisa Plains.” This light came from Mt. Diablo, one of several nearby locations that Indigenous people in that region “considered places of emergence” (194). The actual light, however, originated with California’s first-ever airplane beacon. Miranda views this light—a symbol of colonization atop a sacred Indigenous mountain—as a call to understand “both the blessing and the genocide” (196). She recalls a story of Indigenous people who escaped a mission and then disappeared after reaching Mt. Diablo. Miranda then explains how, in the mid-19th century, her direct ancestors came to acquire, and then to lose, their own plot of land, a ranch called El Potrero. With mixed emotions, she discovers that El Potrero still exists as part of a combination of nature conservancy and real-estate development for the very wealthy. Mark Miller, historian of this Santa Lucia preserve, helps Miranda locate with more precision the probable site of her family’s ranch amid 20,000 acres, only 10% of which are set aside for luxury development. Miranda then describes a dream in which she, her mother, and her sister Louise visited El Potrero and saw remnants of the old ranch. Miranda concludes with a quotation from Isabel Meadows, the source of much information found in J. P. Harrington’s notes. Isabel encourages others, including perhaps her tribe’s descendants, “to make story again in the world” (207).