Every story is a kind of model. To function, it must have a shape, it has to have scale, and it has to have participants. A frame becomes so much more interesting once a person enters it, Kurt Vonnegut once said. I didn’t appreciate the power of models until I moved to Sacramento in the mid-1980s—enthralled with a story that California pipes out across the country so regularly that it’s hard to tell where it’s coming from. The bland, sunny story of a place of outdoor activities and convertibles and feathered hair blowing in the wind. It was the ’80s, after all, and that’s when my family entered the frame.
That fall, I encountered another myth California piped not out but within. That fall, little replicas of the missions began to appear everywhere around my school. Papier-mâché buildings modeled on the 21 religious outposts that Franciscan priests had established between 1769 and 1823. I was too old to participate, but around my school and neighborhood, hundreds of tiny renditions of this evangelical franchise backed by the Spanish Empire began popping up. These models, familiar to anyone who passed through California schools between then and very recently, were accompanied by largely imaginary reports on the lives of the Native Californians who’d passed through them. These “reports” reiterated a tale as mythical as that of John Wayne’s westerns, also then playing on perpetual repeat. In the missions’ case: of a benevolent church, bringing religion to a heathen coast, and peoples who were grateful for the chance to come into the fold.
In reality, the missionization of California’s Native population was one of the country’s most thorough and destructive genocides. In little more than half a century, the population of Indigenous people was reduced from a million to mere thousands through brutal neglect, abuse, disease, and outright murder. Like many evangelical systems in which a small group of untouchable people held all the power, missionization was also a sexual kleptocracy that wreaked untold damage through generations.
It is astounding how long this destructive and delusional fantasy of benign coexistence sold by “the mission project” remained a core part of the California curriculum. Indeed, it is the last act of that genocide, as with so many: the erasure of the reality that the myth replaces. It is not as if the records of how the various tribes lived in what has become California do not exist—photographs, oral testimony, and more have been preserved. And of course, there are people who keep alive the stories and knowledge that were passed down to them—Indians like Deborah A. Miranda, who was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Washington, of mixed Mexican, European, and Native heritage. The tribe she’s enrolled in, the Ohlone–Costanoan Esselen Nation in the Greater Monterey Bay area, has been battling the federal government for recognition for years.
Miranda’s 2013 book, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, which has been reissued in a 10th-anniversary edition and is the focus of this week’s California Book Club gathering, is a desperately needed correction to centuries of fantasy and whitewashing. “What would these missions say, / if they could speak?” Miranda asks in a poem in the book. “What would I ask them, / if they would answer?” Bad Indians is an attempt to imagine that answer. To stop replicating fantasy and to use the actual materials that exist to ask hard questions. To build a new lexicon around her own history, as well as that of California Indian people. To craft her own mission project.
Miranda’s dialogic kit is rich and deep, and it uses archival aesthetics to create a story that is as full of information and lacunae as California history itself. Accepting that some parts of her family’s past will never be retrievable gives Miranda the chance to allow readers to appreciate how much was destroyed in the history of contact between California’s Native tribes and the Mexican and European settlers who came to establish the mission system. Redeploying some of the very same questions schoolchildren are asked to contemplate, the book tells the story of her family within a larger story of California Indians over the past 300 years, adopting the forms of poems and letters, brief memoirs, historical essays, investigations, worksheets, oral histories, found poems, field notes, pseudo-phrenological data, and special prayers. It is a dazzling array of storytelling modes.
In using these forms, which have been wielded against her people, Miranda takes the power of descriptive categorization—of her people and of her family—and replaces it with a rich tonal expression of regard. This tone is one of mutuality and of respect, and so it has within it veins of irony and sarcasm. There are notes of grief and of longing, even edges of wonder, flat-out wonder. Finally, and most important, there are many sounds of care in her voice, for Miranda knows that in attempting to re-create her past, she has begun a project that may take her the rest of her life. Indeed, outside this book, she has already dedicated time to making sure the Ohlone–Costanoan Esselen achieve recognition.
If Miranda were not so deft in weaving these many threads, Bad Indians would become a cacophony. Instead, moving at just the right pace between prose and poetry, between lyric forms and prosaic facts, Miranda has crafted a classic memoir. It is not just an act of retrieval; it is a meditation on memory and the spiritual act of living in honor of what could have happened, what almost certainly happened. Just at the point that the book has given us something heavy to carry, the form bears us aloft. Her novena to her ancestors is, in particular, a high point of this act of belief:
Oh unholy pagans who refused to convert, oh pagans who converted, oh pagans who recanted, oh converts who survived, hear our supplication: make us in your image, grant us your pride.
Along the way, this memoir delivers, too, what life stories often provide: vivid portraits of people. Miranda moves elegantly between kith and kin, treating both with love and respect. She peels back layers of assumption around a trio of over-100-year-old women, women who were interviewed by one anthropologist, and imagines the stories their bodies carried. She pauses, importantly, on the historical record of a young girl who was assaulted at her mission and whose story was carried forward a century in the body of a woman who spoke to a white anthropologist. On the page, we see a record of her account, written down in the hand of the man recording it. There it is, stark as day, as if it happened yesterday.
This collapsing of time suits one of the great projects of this book, which is to show how the past is in fact not past for many people in California and how it travels in waves through the bodies of her family. She traces the mutations of the church’s sexual kleptocracy to childhood abuse, like what she suffers; she traces the theft of land to homelessness today; she draws a line from the violence of forced conversion to the longing of being alive today, to epidemics of suicide and drink. In this sense, Miranda’s mission model is about one of the most realistic to have ever been created for what missionization meant to California Indians—it does what previous models did not; it traces the architecture of pain into the present.
Bad Indians also narrates how history isn’t just simply an event that happens but a context and a place through which people travel and attempt to retrieve information. Situating her family within the history of the California missions and their unraveling and decadence, Miranda introduces us to her great-grandfather Tomás Santos Miranda, born 1877, the year Crazy Horse was killed and Sitting Bull escaped to Canada. At the time Tomás was born, California’s Indian population had sunk from 1 million, pre-missionization, to just 20,000, thanks to disease, abuse, sickness, and sterilization. Of him, Miranda has one photo.
But suddenly, the official record of the state begins to capture parts of her family’s existence. To see their names deep into the middle of this book is like seeing stars for the first time. “The young couple Tomás and Inés were counted in the 1905–06 Kelsey census in Sur,” Miranda writes, “along with two children: my grandfather Thomas Anthony Miranda and his sister Carmen. The Mirandas were noted as ‘Indians without land.’” The one photo of him, however, says something entirely different. Here is a man, large in effect, whose immensity of presence means that, in a photo with 14 people in it, the eye goes directly to him. As Miranda says, he is dangerous, not because of what he is capable of but because of what he has seen.
The memoir as an existential family mystery: here is another form that Miranda’s book grows out of, in keeping with other highlights of the genre, from Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million to Tracy K, Smith’s recent To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, which begins with Smith finding her father’s name in an Alabama census, nearly a century after it was written. How many people have backtracked through their own family trails to run into a recent place where the trail goes cold? How many have felt that burst of sunlight when they see for the first time their family name amid the violence of an archive?
As we drift toward closer times, details proliferate. We meet Miranda’s grandfather Tom, whose “life story is not just about being Californian,” she writes, but of being a “California Indian after a great holocaust.” He was a lumberjack, a cowboy, a racetrack money runner. He died when she was 14 but left behind tapes—tapes made during family dinners, stolen moments, sometimes with her own father asking the questions. Spliced in here are Tom’s own words about how he visited his grandfather on 10 acres or so, where he would spearfish and dry salmon. He tells of David Jacks, an early-20th-century land speculator who bought up or outright took huge plots until he had amassed some 60,000 acres and wondered why he was disliked. We hear of his work, women he knew, when Pearl Harbor was bombed, the internment of the Japanese. “There is something to me that doesn’t fit. Who the hell was our president then? Seems it was a setup. It was a put-up job. The government can do some funny things.”
The photos as we get nearer and nearer to the present grow brighter; the distance us to them is closer. Smiles brighter. Miranda isn’t just a great storyteller; she looks at art and describes it brilliantly. This skill becomes one of the ways she disintermediates from her own life at a young age, due to trauma. We see it as a tableau, a terribly disturbing scene. By the time we get to Miranda’s first memory, at age three, her father pressing her mother up against a wall with force, the reality reel is crystal clear. But thanks to everything that has come before, we know all the forces that are pushing down on these bodies. By six, her father has disappeared, off to prison. She grows up, suffers abuse, leaves a young marriage, and loops back to describe growing up largely outside, her head turned by sagebrush manzanita, details coming back in orbitals, her father being sentenced to eight years when she is three. “I found books that provided names for the riches surrounding me. Field guides, children’s encyclopedias. I started with birds, their songs the first thing I heard each morning.”
This is not a book in which landscape rescues all, in which land has the innate and mystical power to heal, but it does do some of that. To see and describe the world allows Miranda to realize what she could not describe. “The more names I could put to a creature, the richer my loneliness became. I could not name the dysfunction around me—I didn’t have words for alcoholism, depression, trauma—but I learned the language of naming to make sense of what I could.”
With time, Miranda grows up and tries to make amends with her father, who goes back to Washington State to try to reconcile with her mother. She tries to figure out what is retrievable.
At some point, it becomes clear she is making a container for the world she is living in right now. A model for a world she is actually inhabiting. Maybe a model isn’t the right metaphor. “Maybe,” she writes, this story is “like a basket that has huge holes where pieces were ripped out and is crumbling to dust and can’t be reclaimed, my tribe must reinvent ourselves—rather than try to copy what isn’t there in the first place. We must think of ourselves as a mosaic, human beings constructed of multiple sources of beauty, pieces that alone are merely incomplete but which, when set into a new design together, complement the shards around us, bring wholeness to the world and ourselves.” Has there ever been a memoir that has respected this inherent multiplicity so beautifully? The one we see in a river, in a leaf, in a family? It is unlikely.•
Join us on November 16 at 5 p.m., when Miranda will appear in conversation with special guest Cutcha Risling Baldy and California Book Club host John Freeman to discuss Bad Indians. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
