In the early 2000s, I was a fourth-grade student at a public elementary school in Southern California. This is to say, I was a participant in California’s mandatory Mission Unit: a curricular requirement to teach students about the Spanish conversion of Native Americans to Catholicism at 21 missions spanning the California coast.
We wrote book reports. We built dioramas. We boarded a 35-foot school bus and visited Mission San Juan Capistrano, where we were grouped into Native “tribes” and played among the olive mills at which the priests once forced Native Americans to toil.
Our capstone project was a full-length musical about the California missions. We addressed it with great enthusiasm. We fashioned costumes from paper grocery bags. We auditioned to be priests, conquistadores, Spanish visitor-generals, and gold prospectors. We celebrated when we won parts, wept childish tears when we did not. We wore hats made of tinfoil and sang songs praising the utility of the missions project to several dozen parents, students, and district administrators. We were treated to ice cream afterward.
In short, we were told a certain story about the California missions. We, in turn, disseminated it and were rewarded for doing so. In writing this, perhaps I continue to disseminate it.
“California is a story,” Deborah A. Miranda begins in Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. And the story, she warns, “is the most powerful force in the world.” This particular story was a mode of understanding that elided the brutal reality of the California missions project, the reality of the missions as the site where the Native population was decimated from 1 million to 20,000 people.
Bad Indians serves as a vital, eloquent corrective to the dominant narrative of California. But when the mission project is as old as the state itself, how does one even begin to issue its correction? How does one do so when the missions archives have been composed and collected by the colonizers themselves? When the Native oral histories in the Smithsonian have been gathered by rapacious white men and certainly shifted according to the perspective of the person gathering and interpreting them? When the writer’s relationship with her Native father has been stained by his violence, abuse, abandonment, and eight-year imprisonment in San Quentin prison—conditions stripped of their historical context?
If Miranda must begin with such materials, then use them she does, though collaged and altered for her own designs. She composes claustrophobic pantoums formed from excerpts of Junípero Serra’s writings. She annotates her daughter’s missions coloring book to reveal its half truths and passive-voice elisions. She conceives of a fourth-grade “Mission Project” of her own. This is not a metaphor: Miranda writes her own belated attempt at answering a fourth-grade mission-project prompt (Miranda, though a “California Indian,” was raised in Oregon and did not complete the Mission Unit herself) by drafting a glossary of various words, such as “bells” and “Adobe bricks.” These seemingly innocuous terms, however, soon give way to “flogging” and “cudgel” and are written defiantly from the first-person perspective of the Native herself.
Bad Indians, however, does not end with such caustic commentary; its ambitions are greater. This is a vibrant tapestry of a text, an assemblage of poetry, oral history, prayer, visual collage, memoir, elegy, and personal testimony. Miranda sifts through the archives to find Indigenous writing, marred as it may be by colonization. She unearths letters sent from Felipe Guáman Poma de Ayala, a Peruvian Indian, to a king detailing various forms of Spaniard abuse—letters that were promptly, devastatingly ignored. She writes to Vicenta Gutierrez, a Native woman who exists because Isabel Meadows, a Native “primary informant” of Smithsonian ethnologist J.P. Harrington, told her story. She transcribes oral histories from her grandfather, whom she met only once, as a baby. She introduces us to her sister, who compiled the first Esselen-English dictionary. She braids her own personal genealogy and history throughout the text, telling us of her beloved, difficult father, “whose body is the source of the most precious part of [her] identity, and the most damning legacies of [her] history.”
The specter of colonization remains throughout it all. In the final section, titled “Post-Colonial Thought Experiment,” Miranda composes a mock assignment for fourth graders to write a report on a California mission, then build one in the miniature. Miranda then repeats the language of the assignment verbatim, replacing “Mission” with “Birmingham Plantation” and “Dachau Concentration Camp.”
The stories we were taught in fourth grade continue to reverberate in the broader culture and in school settings. This April, countless groups of teenagers will gather at Mission San Juan Capistrano. Behind them will be a familiar sight: bells, adobe brick, and a brilliant blue sky. Bells that “order[ed] [Natives] to prayer,” bricks that claimed countless Native lives in their making, and a sky that mutely watched it all.
The teenagers will be wearing tuxedos and dresses, because it will be prom, and Mission San Juan Capistrano is where teenagers in Southern California take their prom pictures. This will not be done in secret or in shame—it will be sanctioned by the mission itself. This is the natural outcome of the story we have been telling about California.
In 2017, California’s Common Core curriculum underwent a redesign. The Mission Unit was largely abolished, thanks in no small part to the advocacy of California Native Americans. The students taking prom pictures will be the last of the students educated under the old fourth-grade Mission Unit. But though the unit itself may be gone, the story it disseminated still remains. How will we change the story of California? With what Native-led texts can we begin?
It is our unearned fortune that Miranda asks these challenging questions and directs us to the languages and stories with which to answer them.•
Join us on November 16 at 5 p.m., when Miranda will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Bad Indians. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
