Showing posts with label California Indians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label California Indians. Show all posts

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Slapin's review of Deborah Miranda's BAD INDIANS

Editor's Note: This review may not be published elsewhere without written permission from its author, Beverly Slapin. Copyright 2012 by Beverly Slapin. All rights reserved.


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Miranda, Deborah A. (Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen, Chumash), Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Heyday, 2012.

“Story is the most powerful force in the world,” Deborah writes, “in our world, maybe in all worlds. Story is culture. Story, like culture, is constantly moving. It is a river where no gallon of water is the same gallon it was one second ago. Yet it is still the same river. It exists as a truth. As a whole. Even if the whole is in constant change. In fact, because of that constant change.”

For better or for worse, young Deborah never had to endure the daily humiliations of fourth grade in California, where children are taught the dominant discourse about the California missions. Where non-Indian children (and their parents) construct “mission” dioramas with beneficent padres instructing and supervising willing Indian neophytes as they learn how to work. Where Indian children—especially California Indian children—shrink into their seats, trying to disappear.

The real story—people massacred, children violated, land and languages stolen, cultures broken beyond recognition—is rarely told.

After asking her young son’s teacher to let him pass on the project—and being refused—an Indian parent I know allowed him to construct the required model mission. “So Nick built his mission and brought it home,” she told me. “And we built a fire and we talked about it again, how Indian people were enslaved and died building missions and living in missions. Then we put it in the fire and burned it and I promised Nick that I would always stick up for him and challenge anyone who would keep opening up these scars.”

“All my life,” Deborah writes, “I have heard only one story about California Indians: godless, dirty, stupid, primitive, ugly, passive, drunken, immoral, lazy, weak-willed people who might make good workers if properly trained and motivated. What kind of story is that to grow up with?”

Bad Indians is this story—the story of the missionization of California. In constructing Bad Indians, Deborah creates “a space where voices can speak after long and often violently imposed silence.” For Deborah, the stories seeped “out of old government documents, BIA forms, field notes, the diaries of explorers and priests, the occasional writings or testimony from Indians, family stories, photographs, newspaper articles.” Together, these disparate voices belie the dominant discourse; they are stories of tenacious survival. And they are Deborah’s “mission project.”

But Bad Indians is more than these voices; it’s Deborah’s family’s story as well. In it, I’m reminded of something that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that has recently been channeled through Kelly Clarkson: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Actually, Nietzsche wrote it with more elegance: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger."

Deborah’s life’s twists and turns have brought her to this place, to find her ancestors’ stories, to tell her own family’s stories, to connect them—and to heal. Some childhood memories, some faded photographs, some snippets of stories written down word for word by an anthropologist, some paragraphs from old textbooks. A lesser author might have crafted a novel spanning the generations, a linear novel, maybe a chapter for each character. But Deborah didn’t and wouldn’t do that; it would have dishonored her ancestors. Rather, she looks at what is—the pieces, the shards of a broken mirror—and interprets, imagines, wonders. If she doesn’t know a thing, she says so. Throughout, she is in awe of the voices, drawings, photos, whatever she can find—all treasured gifts, entrusted to her by the elders and ancestors she never got to meet.

“Who we are is where we are from,” Deborah writes. “Where we are from is who we are.”

On a Saturday morning, Deborah and relatives slowly and mindfully circle the grounds of the Mission Soledad, picking up bone fragments: “Here is a finger joint, here a tooth. Here a shattered section of femur, here something unidentifiable except for the lacy pattern that means human being. Our children run to us with handfuls of ancestors they keep calling ‘fossils’ because youth and privilege don’t let the truth sink in yet.” As they gently bury the tiny pieces of bones, “Xu-lin, we say to our broken ancestors: xu-lin, sprinkling sage, mugwort, and tobacco over the small grave. Xu-lin, we whisper as the earth takes back. Xu-lin, a plea and a promise: return.”

Bad Indians is not easy reading. Deborah draws connections between the violence of the California missions, the violence perpetrated on the descendants of the “Mission Indians,” the violence she witnessed at home, and the rapes she endured as a child: “Imprisonment. Whippings. Betrayal. Rape.” And she doesn’t mince words: “Erasure is a bitch, isn’t it?”

At the end of Bad Indians, Deborah quotes Tom King (Cherokee), who wrote in The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto, Publishers Group Canada, 2003), “Take it. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. But don’t say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”

If you’re a fourth-grade teacher who has ever taught a “mission” unit, if you’re a parent of a fourth-grader who has ever helped her child construct a “mission diorama,” if you’ve ever admired the architecture of a California mission, if you’ve ever harbored the thought that Ishi was the “last of his tribe,” you no longer have an excuse for perpetuating the horrors. Don’t say you didn’t know.

In Bad Indians, Deborah Miranda has created an achingly beautiful mosaic out of the broken shards of her people and herself, gently glued together with heartbreak and scars, memories and perseverance and hope. Her writing is crisp and clear and eminently readable, with passion in place of polemic. Deborah is a strong, brave, compassionate spirit, and I am honored to call her “friend.”

—Beverly Slapin

Saturday, March 13, 2010

American Indians in California - Resources

Update from Debbie on May 6, 2021: Dr. Miranda's site is no longer accessible. You can find an article by her about the missions, at the Zinn Education Project: Lying to Children About the California Missions and the Indians. 

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On When Turtles Fly, Deborah Miranda is compiling resources for teachers to use in lesson plans about California. She began this project a few weeks ago, with her post titled 4th Grade California Mission Projects.

When we think of California today, we do not, for the most part, teach about American Indians who were there prior to it becoming "California." When we teach about the Gold Rush, we do it in a celebratory or adventurous fashion, and we fail to teach students that those miners (amongst others) committed horrific crimes against Native people. When we teach about the Missions, we gloss over the treatment of Native people at those missions, and we ignore the legacy the Missions had on the lives of Native people. Some Native people embraced Christianity; some imported elements of Christianity to their existing systems of worship; others rejected it.

Here's Deborah's bio, from her page:
I am a member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay area in California. Currently I am an Associate Professor in the English Department at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. I teach Composition, Native American Literatures, American Ethnic Literatures, Women's Literatures, Creative Writing (Poetry and Memoir), among other courses. My first book of poetry, Indian Cartography, was published by Greenfield Review Press in 1999 and won the First Book Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas. The Zen of La Llorona, my second collection, was published by Salt Press in 2004.

We can do better, if we are open to revisiting what we were taught. Bookmark her site!
  • If you're a teacher, use it to develop your lesson plans. 
  • If you're a writer, use it to do research.
  • If you're an editor or reviewer, use it to fact check manuscripts and books.

Friday, January 01, 2010

California Indians Critique Lesson Plans on California Missions

A colleague, Deborah Miranda, publishes a blog called When Turtles Fly. A few days ago, she wrote about the California Missions and how they're taught. I'm copying her first four paragraphs below as a sample of what you'll find if you click on over to "4th Grade California Mission Projects: A Thought Experiment for Parents, Educators, and Students."

Deborah's site has links to books you should read if you're interested in developing a critical understanding of American Indians in California. One example is Rupert Costo and Jeannette Henry Costo's 1984 The Missions of California, A Legacy of Genocide. The information accompanying the book reads:
For two hundred years the native people of California have borne the stigma of "Mission Indians." The names of their nations and tribes are Hupa, Kumeyaay, Chuilla, Pauma, Malki, Cupa and Pamo to name a few.
Do you refer to the indigenous peoples of California as "Mission Indians" or do you use specific names? Deborah's site has much to offer. Do add When Turtles Fly to your reading this year.  

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4TH GRADE CALIFORNIA MISSION PROJECTS: A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT FOR PARENTS, EDUCATORS AND STUDENTS

In California schools, students come up against the "Mission Unit" in fourth grade, although the same children have been breathing in the lies most of their lives. Part of California’s history curriculum, the unit is entrenched in the system, and impossible to avoid.

Because this assignment is typically started over Winter Vacation, I’m posting this note for parents and children who are starting their research now. Please be aware that I have other blog posts about the missions as well; please take a look at them too.

The Mission Unit is a powerfully authoritative indoctrination in Mission Mythology against which fourth graders have little if any resistance, and intense pressure is put upon students (and their parents) to create a "Mission Project" that glorifies the era and glosses over both Spanish and Mexican exploitation of Indians, as well as American enslavement of those same Indians during American rule.

In other words, the Mission Unit is all too often a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny than actually educational or a jumping off point for critical thinking or accurate history.