Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

The two parts of this theme have different implications. Survival requires reactive adaptability and endurance amid destructive forces, while forging a new identity is an act of creation. In the book’s Introduction, Miranda unites these two components: “Those who will not change do not survive; but who are we, when we have survived?” (xiv).

Miranda encounters evidence of survival in all descendants of California’s “Mission Indians.” In the faces of the three elderly women who appear in “The Belles of San Luis Rey” photograph, for instance, Miranda sees “bottom-of-the-barrel, end-of-the-line, tenacious survival” (50). Tomas Santos Miranda, the author’s great-grandfather, appears in only one surviving photograph, wherein he “bears the look of a man who has seen the worst life can throw at him, yet refuses to give up” (72). Miranda notes that Tomas Santos was born in 1877, by which time California’s Indigenous population had fallen from as high as one million a century earlier to around 20,000. Tomas Santos entered the world under these circumstances “and—somehow—lived” (74). Likewise, as she listens on cassette tapes to the voice of her late grandfather, Tom Miranda, the author feels “awed that he survived” (77). Even her father, Al Miranda, Sr., who spent eight years in prison for a brutal rape, was “born always and already a survivor, child of one of twenty thousand out of one million who took the brunt of colonization with their sturdy bodies and gentle spirits” (158). In fact, Miranda eventually concludes that her father’s brutality itself amounts to a legacy of missionization, a tactic adopted from the Spaniards and used for the sake of survival.

Descendants of mission survivors, whom Miranda regards as survivors in their own right, face the difficult task of forging a new identity for themselves. This poses challenges because so little of what once united them—culture, language, ties to land, etc.—has survived in its original form. Even Miranda’s tribe lacks a clear name and formal recognition from the US government. In her reflections from the Philadelphia airport, she refers to the “tribe I’m enrolled in, the Ohlone Esselen Costanoan Nation” (135). In the book’s final section, she describes “loss of land” as a “kind of soul-wound that the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation still feels” (202). The Esselen tribe and language appear prominently throughout the book, but the Ohlone and Costanoan connections to her reconstituted nation remain unclear. In a larger sense, this is merely a matter of semantics. Miranda notes that this process of reforging identities has taken place since the late 18th century, for when “Esselen and other communities went into the missions,” in most cases against their will, “their beliefs and stories began to merge” (194). Creation, therefore, often followed destruction as a matter of course.

Forging a new identity from surviving remnants, however, can also be a matter of choice. On occasion, Miranda notes that she has a diverse heritage. Her mother, a white woman from Beverly Hills, had English, French, and Jewish ancestors. Miranda’s father was a direct descendant of “Mission Indians” on both sides of his family. Thus, Miranda describes her mother and father as “colonizer and Indian; European and Indigenous” (xii). Through her father’s family alone, Miranda traces her Indigenous heritage, what she calls “the most precious part” of her identity (172). This is why, for instance, Miranda includes Part 4’s “Testimony,” the book’s lengthiest section by far, which she devotes entirely to her ambivalent feelings about her father. Meanwhile, when Miranda imagines her own place in the future history and mythology of “Mestiza Nation,” she refers to herself not by name but as a motherless girl. Plagued by intense grief, sadness, and substance misuse, Miranda’s mother often disappeared for long stretches and neglected her daughter. This explains Miranda’s reference to being motherless but not her corresponding focus on her father and his lineage, for her father also disappeared for long stretches and then, when present, filled Miranda’s life with rage and violence. That focus is Miranda’s choice.