I remember the first word I ever put on paper. On a brown paper bag, with a blood-crimson crayon. “D E B Y.” I sat at my grandmother’s kitchen counter in a red cabin with white trim, high in the Tehachapi Mountains of California. I was four years old.
Already, I knew I might disappear. I knew my presence here on Earth was so tentative that I was in constant danger. One year earlier, I had lost everything: a mother who went out one night and never came home, a father who was taken away to some place called “San Quentin,” siblings who were with me one day and in “foster care” the next. I was the sole survivor. Although I didn’t understand why, and although I grieved, I did not want to follow my family into the void. I wanted to live.
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
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“D E B Y.” It was as if those four letters grew roots and plowed down through that Formica countertop, into the wooden floor, through the cabin’s beams and concrete foundation, deep into the Indigenous heart of the Tehachapi Mountains themselves. I had staked myself to this place. From that moment on, writing gave me the means to carry myself in the world even when nobody else could.
Three years later, I wrote my first story. “How the John Rabbit Familys Lived in the Tall Grass” went like this: Two baby rabbits are born to a mother and father who feed and protect them. Then “it was rabbit season and the mother and father had to leave the baby rabbits.… The babys ran and hid. They almost got shot but they were too fast.” The babies survive, grow up, have their own baby rabbits; but hunting season comes along again. This time, “five got wounded and soon died and father rabbit was the only one left.” Undaunted, he bravely finds a new mate, and luckily, just before the next hunting season, a small girl rescues the whole family, taking them safely into her house. “They were very happy to be with the little girl, and they lived happily ever after. the end.”
I look back at that narrative as a kind of topography of my childhood. All the familiar landmarks appear: parents who vanish, siblings in danger, the repetitive threat of physical destruction. I see an older history, too, a palimpsest of genocide and grief marking generations of my father’s California Indian Esselen and Chumash family. Did storytelling claim me, or the other way around? Words make sense of chaos, turn the tsunami of trauma into something I can hold, examine, shape, learn from. I am the little girl who saves the rabbit family. I am the one who saves myself. Writing, for me, is like breathing: I do it because I must, because crafting language braids a tether to survival.
Halfway through writing Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, I realized that I was in the middle of a story whose origin went clear back to the moment my ancestors first laid eyes on those Franciscan missionaries and Spanish soldiers—and I understood how brutally our ancestors’ missionized experiences drove family history. Thanks to genocide, I had no tribal records to draw from; I had a pile of photographs, government documents, mission records, newspaper stories—fragments of the larger story. These bits and pieces expressed themselves through an array of genres: poetry, essay, fiction, memoir, visual art, found poetry, genealogy. I realized my project was a hybrid thing, a mosaic of broken pieces. Who will ever publish something like this? How can I ever tell a story so shattered?
I wrestled with this dilemma, but only briefly. It quickly became clear that this book had a mind of its own. It was guided by the force of ancestral survival. I wrote the book the only way it could be written, and found the right publisher. Since then, Bad Indians has gone out into the world, a decolonizing mosaic of memory, a reinvention of Indigenous California. Storytelling, as it always has, allows us to write ourselves back into the story of a world that keeps trying to erase us.•
