I am a community college English professor, which means I’ve been hearing about ChatGPT a lot as of late. Almost every meeting, training, and webinar now includes a celebration or lamentation of the new AI technology that can generate passable copies of student assignments. Think pieces have been published in droves, some cleverly revealing that they themselves were written by ChatGPT. A recent article in the Atlantic raised the question “Will ChatGPT kill the student essay?”
I, for one, hope it does. In fact, like many other professors, I’ve long fantasized about the demise of this perfunctory and soulless genre, one that seemingly invites artificial intelligence as its rightful author. As educational-technology expert Brenna Clarke Gray insightfully puts it, “we trained our learners to write like robots…and shockingly, robots are also good at writing like robots.”
What will be left of academic writing once the college essay is dead? My hope is that it will move in the direction of Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians, a genre-bending masterpiece of history, poetry, memoir, and genealogy that shows us exactly the kind of writing that artificial intelligence can’t do. The book draws heavily from archival research—mainly recorded from the colonizer’s perspective. But then, in a move that would be challenging, if not technically impossible, for ChatGPT, Miranda interprets this history through the lens of her intersectional identity: a queer woman of color, a poet and scholar, a survivor of childhood abuse, and, most prominently, a California Indian of mixed ethnicity and heritage. By inserting her voice and perspective into the stale and one-sided historical record, Miranda transforms her research process into a living conversation about California’s past and ongoing violence to Indigenous culture and how healing can begin.
Sometimes this insertion of Miranda’s voice is quite literal, as when she annotates a page from a children’s coloring book about Junípero Serra’s mission, questioning its Eurocentric and sanitized narrative. “After secularization, the church fell to ruin,” explains the book, to which Miranda comments in the margins, “Missionized Indians left to starve.” More abstract is her recasting of historical newspaper articles into found poetry, the added line breaks highlighting the casual violence of statements such as this one from the San Francisco Bulletin:
The same day,
three men from the camp at Angel’s
came upon a party
of ten Indians
and had a bout with them—
killed one Indian,
wounded several—
two so badly
that they may almost be called
“good Indians.”
Juxtaposed against the horrors depicted in archival documents such as this, Miranda’s discussion of her personal and family history highlights the violence and intergenerational trauma of colonization. One particularly chilling section alternates passages by mission priests encouraging Indians to use more-punitive parenting practices with scenes of Miranda’s father terrorizing and beating his children. “In this trailer in the woods,” Miranda writes, “my father’s arm rises and falls in an old, savage rhythm learned from strangers who came with whips and attack dogs, taught us how to raise our children.” Throughout the text, she suggests a parallel between her Indian father and the white recorders of mission history: both are unreliable and abusive, yet they provide some of the only information connecting her to her Native ancestry.
Miranda’s interpretive process reflects her self-education as she reconstructs a stolen history using clues left by the thieves who stole it. In a 2022 interview, she generalizes this education to a larger cultural project for Indigenous Californians: “Many, if not most, Mission Indians in California…do not have language, do not have culture. We are picking up these broken pieces and trying to reassemble them into a new identity, a new kind of California Indian.” She anchors this identity in the image of the “bad Indian,” a phrase she found in numerous newspapers and mission documents describing Indigenous people who broke the colonizers’ rules or norms (in these same documents, “good Indian” is generally used to describe not compliant Indians but dead ones). Miranda states in the same interview, “Those people, those bad Indians, are the reason I’m here. If they had not broken rules, if they had not stolen food to survive, maybe I wouldn’t be here.” She transforms the villains of historical record into idols and champions, and in “Novena to Bad Indians,” she depicts them as prophets providing consolation and guidance in times of despair.
At the time she wrote Bad Indians, Miranda was an English professor and certainly familiar with the disinterested and supposedly objective tone generally required of academic writing. In the 1990 book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, sociology professor Patricia Hill Collins describes how expressions of personal and cultural perspective are unwelcome in scholarly discourse: “Much of my formal academic training has been designed to show me that I must alienate myself from my communities, my family, and even my own self in order to produce credible intellectual work.” Collins overcame this alienation by returning to her own community and identity as a source of knowledge and interpretative insight: “Reconciling what we have been trained to see as opposites, a reconciliation signaled by my inserting myself in the text by using ‘I,’ ‘we’ and ‘our’ instead of the more distancing terms ‘they’ and ‘one,’ was freeing for me.”
At a time when higher education is hemorrhaging students and suffering from a crisis of plagiarism and cheating, we might consider the model described by Miranda and Collins as the antidote to student apathy and alienation. Students whose high school experiences were disrupted by pandemic shutdowns no longer view higher education as an unquestionable rite of passage, and students of color (who make up approximately 75 percent of California college enrollments) may feel alienated by curricular materials and structures largely designed for and by white academics.
If college writing hopes to survive, it needs to become more meaningful to students, and quickly. Colleges are beginning to realize this and incorporate more creativity, identity, and perspective into assignments. In just the past few years, positionality statements have gained popularity as prefaces to academic research. Many English departments, including at the California community college where I teach, have embraced a linguistic-justice model of instruction rather than enforce prescriptive grammar rules and insist on the dominant dialect of English. Professors are beginning to encourage the use of first-person pronouns and the inclusion of identity-based perspectives, measures that will make academic writing less robotic and more meaningful and intellectual. And for those concerned about the relevance of personal writing in the “real world,” in an age of increasing entrepreneurship and social media marketing, writing that expresses voice and perspective may in fact prove to be the most useful to students after they leave college.
“Human beings have no other way of knowing that we exist, or what we have survived, except through the vehicle of story,” Miranda writes in her introduction. Once students are able to use academia to make sense of their own life stories, and their life stories to make sense of academia, then not only will they no longer be able to outsource their writing assignments to robots, but I am betting they will no longer want to.•
Join us on November 16 at 5 p.m., when Miranda will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Cutcha Risling Baldy to discuss Bad Indians. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
