We’re pleased to announce that our special guest for this month’s California Book Club gathering to discuss Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir with the author and host John Freeman is Cutcha Risling Baldy.
Miranda and Risling Baldy share a deep and creative interest in researching, reclaiming, and writing their personal stories and the history of their Native American ancestors, which were previously controlled and recorded only from the settler-colonialist perspective and western scholars practicing “salvage ethnography” grounded in, Risling Baldy writes, the assumption that Native people had a “dying culture” and would not survive the intrusion into the West. This grew into the idea that only western scholars could be experts on Indigenous peoples, who were positioned as primitive in the spectrum from primitive to civilized that scholars had created.
Both Miranda and Risling Baldy also write about the traumas women have experienced for generations, connecting these to their tribal histories and suggesting that a kind of recovery may be possible through writing.
Risling Baldy is an associate professor of Native American studies (NAS) at Cal Poly Humboldt and the codirector of the NAS Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute. She cofounded the Native Women’s Collective, a nonprofit that supports continued revitalization of Native American arts and culture.
Risling Baldy received her PhD in Native American studies with a designated emphasis in feminist theory and research from UC Davis and her MFA in creative writing and literary research from San Diego State University. Her research focuses on Indigenous feminisms, California Indians, environmental justice, and decolonization. Risling Baldy is Hupa, Karuk, and Yurok and enrolled in the federally recognized Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California.
Risling Baldy’s book, We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies, was named the Best First Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the 2019 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Conference. The book recounts the revitalization of the Hoopa Valley Tribe women’s sacred puberty ceremony and the Flower Dance. Risling Baldy first learned of the dance from her mother over dinner, after she’d started menstruating at age 12. Her mother explained that in the old days, they would have done a Flower Dance for Risling Baldy; the time when girls become women was important and a cause for celebration for the Hupa.
The ceremony had gone largely unpracticed because misinformation about sexual mores at the ceremony had been given to soldiers and spread among the colonialists. The claim that circulated was that all men were given access to the girl being celebrated. Miners began coming to the dance and taking the girl aside to rape her. And government programs tried to teach the Hupa that a dance celebrating menstruation demonstrated the primitivism of the tribe.
Risling Baldy only later realized that her resistant tween response to her mother at the table was an internalization of the Western menstrual taboo. Years later, at the end of the 1900s, the tribe’s women, including Risling Baldy’s mother, Lois Risling, used anthropological records and the memories of the tribe’s elders to revitalize the ceremony.
In the book, Risling Baldy quotes her mother, who says that the Flower Dance heals traumatized women when they’ve been “mutilated” spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Lois Risling explains, “This dance comes along and says, ‘I think enough about you that I’m going to, for ten days or five days, or whatever it is, I’m going to sing over you every night. I’m going to make sure that you have a good experience.’”•
Join us on November 16 at 5 p.m., when Miranda will appear in conversation with Risling Baldy and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Indians. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
MISSIONIZATION
Author David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Winter Counts) talks to Miranda about California Indian history and her hybrid memoir. —Alta
STORY OF MASS-SHOOTING TRAGEDIES
Critic and Alta Journal contributor Mark Athitakis reviews gun-industry reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson’s American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, a cautionary tale about inventor Eugene Stoner’s “hobby that got out of hand” and the host of histories that invention spawned. —Alta
UNRELENTING GLAMOUR
Author Blythe Roberson (America the Beautiful? One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled) writes a humorous piece about what a writer can expect when she goes on a book tour. —Alta
WRITERS ON WRITERS
In case you missed it, Alta Live showcased a conversation between Lydia Kiesling (Mobility) and prior CBC author C Pam Zhang (The Land of Milk and Honey), who have great new books out, and you can watch a video of their discussion. —Alta
INDIGENOUS COOKING AND RECIPES
Survival Food: North Woods Stories by a Menominee Cook, by Menominee and Healdsburg author Thomas Pecore Weso, was launched posthumously last weekend by Alta Journal contributor Jane Ciabattari and poet Denise Low as part of the Indigenous Voices Series sponsored by a City of Healdsburg Public Art Grant. —Press Democrat
DISTINCTIVE VOICE
Author Justin Torres has been short-listed for the National Book Awards for his fantastic second novel, Blackouts. Los Angeles Times staff writer Jeremy Childs calls the book an “experimental journey into the annals of queer history that is equal parts intergenerational love letter and homoerotic fever dream.” —Los Angeles Times
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