Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, by Deborah A. Miranda, is a classic of Native American literature. Released 10 years ago, the book utilizes a hybrid, mixed-genre, experimental form to present Miranda’s family history while also educating readers about the brutal history of Indigenous citizens in California.
Miranda uses poetry, memoir, historical documents, and satire to enlighten and entertain readers. There are few books like it, and a 10th-anniversary edition was recently released, containing 50 pages of new material. The following interview was conducted via email and has been edited for length and clarity.
It’s incredible that Bad Indians was released a decade ago. I’ve loved the book for a long time, and I especially appreciated the historical material at the beginning of the book, where you provide an overview of the extreme mistreatment of California Natives by the missionaries, including the various weapons that were used to inflict pain on those who’d broken some arbitrary rule. Can you talk more about this, including the involuntary labor—slavery, really—forced upon them?
Your question touches on the long-running argument about whether missionization was a form of slavery, even if the buying or selling of Indigenous people never actually took place at that time (and to be clear, California Indians were bought and sold later, during the American era, under the tacit approval of the United States government). Here’s my take on it. The Spanish Crown was very concerned that the Russians, French, and Portuguese were eyeing or even harvesting the lucrative natural resources along the west coast of the continent. Spain was anxious to establish a secure hold of the area but did not have the money, the resources, or willing and able Spanish people to send colonists.
Missionization of the existing Indigenous population was meant to create new Spanish citizens of the lowest class for labor and, ironically, use Indigenous bodies to secure the land for Spain. But this meant that Indians could not be allowed a choice in the matter, nor could they have the freedom to leave the mission itself or the mission system. Neither could they claim rights as “full” Spanish citizens (with a right to the justice system, ownership of property, physical freedom, and so on)—the labor force that colonization depended on would evaporate!
So coercive citizenship, which looks a lot like enslavement, was at the core of missionization. It required violent treatment of these so-called citizens to succeed. The forms of physical violence inflicted on Indigenous people in the missions were called “punishment” but, like the term “citizen,” meant something else entirely. The word “punishment” implies a consequence of wrongdoing, of being wrong. In the case of missionization, a Native’s very being is wrong because, for whatever reason the priest determines, the body is not conforming to Spanish standards for laborer, servant, or—for women—the breeder of more laborers. Horrific floggings, exposure to extreme weather in stocks, solitary imprisonment, shaming, withholding food and water were, in reality, not “punishments” for refusing to act correctly but violent acts of intimidation and domination meant to subjugate a formerly free human. To me, this clearly means that missionization was a form of enslavement, or lifelong incarceration into which one was born and within which one died—call it servitude, enslavement, but not citizenship.
I was stunned to learn that, until recently, kids in California had to create a whitewashed “Mission Project,” where they’d build replicas of a mission while completely ignoring the context of Indigenous oppression and forced labor. But I was happy to read that this practice seems to be on the decline, in no small part because of your work. What can you share with us about this? Is that practice still used in schools, to your knowledge?
I hope that Bad Indians has had some effect on changing perceptions about the mission project, and I know that tribal communities and individuals do powerful work as well. Changing something viewed as a tradition and, no matter how misinformed, is part of an identity is difficult and will take time—and a lot of determined work from everyone.
The mission project is in a tenuous state of transition. In 2017, the California legislature announced a new History-Social Science Framework, de-emphasizing the building of mission dioramas and suggesting curricula that teaches “missions were sites of conflict, conquest, and forced labor. Students should consider cultural differences, such as gender roles and religious beliefs, in order to better understand the dynamics of Native and Spanish interaction.” This was a big step; however, legislation does not mandate such a change and, perhaps more important, doesn’t provide funding for curriculum development, teacher training, collaboration with local California tribes, or even alternative textbooks. That makes it hard for teachers to be enthusiastic about moving in this direction.
Then, there are objections from teachers and parents. We frequently hear that kids aren’t ready for the truth about Indigenous enslavement, land theft, genocide, and historical trauma. But if we can teach about the enslavement of Africans that happened in this country, we can certainly find a way to teach about the horrors of missionization for Indigenous citizens. German children, for example, learn about their country’s history of anti-Semitism and genocide throughout their schooling, not just in one or two grade levels. I think the real obstacle to completely ditching the mission project (and attitude) is whether adults are ready to face the truth about California’s mission mythology as the foundation of their current lifestyle and state history.
I was truly moved by the section regarding your little brother and your love and desire to protect him from your father. Later in that chapter, you recount your father’s death and your work to come to terms with him—his difficult upbringing and the cycle of cruelty imposed on him. Was that section difficult to write, or was it cathartic?
Writing about my father was complicated for several reasons. First of all, when I tried to write about my father’s cruelty and violence, the work felt predictable, almost boring, overly dramatic. He came across like a typical bully, the bad guy who is easy to hate, and my writing did not convey any of the complex history or emotions that were actually key. Also, I had learned to numb myself to that violence so I could survive it.
I struggled with this piece until I took it to the Macondo Writers Workshop, where Dorothy Allison read the rough draft of the early manuscript. She had already spoken to our group about how much harder it is to write an unlikable character than a lovable character; what she told me during a one-on-one session was that to write about my father’s flaws, I must first describe why I loved him. I had to show that he was lovable and loving. Otherwise, I would be giving my readers a straw man, a one-dimensional villain, and his betrayal of my love wouldn’t mean much; it certainly would not have the kind of impact that it had on me and my brother. And this was a moment of clarity: I loved my father, yet because of the ways he’d abused and harmed us, I was ashamed of my love. I went back and remembered all the ways in which my father was creative, talented, capable, loving, generous.
I wrote those wonderful parts of him back into existence—his delicious cooking, his carpentry skills, his ability to teach me how to use tools, his thoughtfulness—so I could then watch him transform into the violent and hateful man we also knew when he went back to drinking. It was a painful process, but it was better writing, and it was the truth.
Was it cathartic? Well, things shifted in my heart. I’m still unclear about forgiveness, but I am much clearer about having compassion for what my father inherited from his parents, what he experienced in his own childhood and later in San Quentin. And I learned compassion for myself, for loving him and wanting his love.
Again, it’s amazing that the book has been out for 10 years. Have your feelings about the book changed over the past decade? Also, please tell us about the expanded edition and what’s new in there.
In general, I look through Bad Indians now and I’m astounded that it exists at all, and I am repeatedly amazed by the amount of work this book is doing. I don’t imagine I wrote it by myself, by any means. I had many collaborators—some of them voluntary, like my mother’s work on genealogy—and some involuntary, like Junípero Serra’s letters or J.P. Harrington’s ethnographic field notes. Not to mention the ancestors, waiting for me in the archive or family stories, newspaper articles, and Isabel Meadows’s notes. I’ve realized that I was the right person at the right time to go into the archives and receive the ancestors’ stories.
My years as a poet and scholar gave me the tools I needed to hear these voices and shape them into something others could hear. Sure, there are pieces that I wish I could clean up a little, but for the 10-year-anniversary edition, I decided to leave those as they’d originally been published. The hybrid nature of the book means there are many doorways, many entrances, for readers to find a way into the larger story. I don’t want to mess with that.
When the book was published, in 2013, I was proud of it, but I was completely unprepared for how far it would travel and the impact it would have, not just in California but in Native studies and literature. I did not anticipate the ways Indigenous students, professors, and community members would find their own lives reflected in the book and thus find a way to understand historical trauma and survival in their own families and individual lives. As for the non-Native readers who write to me about the book—the responses are overwhelmingly positive, even as they tell me the book elicits anger at all that they did not know until reading it.
And after that initial publication, the stories didn’t stop; I kept finding and writing them, so adding 50 pages of new material into the 10th-anniversary edition just made sense. “Juliana, 1863” is written in the voice of a young woman locked up in the monjeria, the unmarried-women’s quarters. She misses her mother and her older sisters, who have “escaped” by marrying; she knows a soldier intends to speak to the priest about marrying her and wonders what it will be like to see the stars at night again. Another piece that we added, “Tuolumne,” talks about my father’s release from San Quentin and a story he told me about his father taking him to a place on that river that was somehow sacred and significant. I was excited to be able to include a recently located photograph of Victor, a distant cousin whose status as a joto gave me a doorway into discussing the third gender in California Indigenous communities. We also included “Dear Sonora,” a letter I wrote in response to a fourth-grade student’s questions about mission life for her Mission Unit project. I crafted this letter as much for parents and teachers as for Sonora; I knew I was modeling how to communicate some tough material to a child in an educational and age-appropriate manner.
And there’s a new final essay that looks back on what has happened for California Indians in the past 10 years, including the canonization of Serra, despite evidence that the missions he founded contributed to a vast and violent loss of Indigenous lives and cultures. I’m grateful to Heyday for putting together a 10-year-anniversary edition because what I’ve come to understand is that locating and bringing these voices out into the light of day is my life’s work.
I know now that I’ll never really be finished. I’ll just pass it on to the next generation of Indigenous writers and artists to continue. And that’s perfectly OK with me. Rosy Simas, a Seneca dancer and choreographer, notes that if time is nonlinear, or spiral, then doing the work to heal ourselves also returns to heal the scars on the DNA of our ancestors. I hope that this work provides doorways to healing in both directions: for myself and for my contemporary Indigenous family and communities, and for our ancestors, whose scars we honor in the telling.•
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.
