___________________________________________
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
