David L. Ulin: Good evening, everybody. Welcome to tonight's edition of the California Book Club. I'm David L. Ulin. I'm the books editor of Alta Journal.
And before we get started, I'd like to introduce those of you who have not been here before or don't know about what we're doing at Alta and the California Book Club to some of our activities. Tonight, we're really thrilled to be welcoming Deborah A. Miranda, the author of Bad Indians, who will be discussing the book with California Book Club host, John Freeman and our special guest, Cutcha Risling Baldy.
I'm really thrilled to be hearing this conversation. This is a fantastic book. For those of you who don't know it, listen to the conversation, rush out and buy the book, and read it and give it to everybody. It's really a wonderful, wonderful piece of work.
I want to talk a little bit about California Book Club and our partners. I will start with the partners. We could not do this without the assistance of a number of entities including Book Passage, Book Soup, Books Inc., Bookshop, BookShop West Portal, Diesel, A bookstore, Green Apple Books, the Huntington USC Institute on California and the West, the Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, Vromans Bookstore, Narrative Magazine and Zyzzyva. This is a real example of the literary community coming together and working together to produce these events. And it's wonderful to have such devoted partners.
The California Book Club is a monthly event. We produce continuous content leading up to each club meeting. And everything is free and available online. Don't miss essays from various contributors reflecting on the book. There's excerpt of Bad Indians, there's an essay by Deborah on why she writes and more. All of this is included in our weekly California Book Club newsletter, which is also free. So please sign up.
And also, just for your edification, every California Book Club episode we've ever done, that's three plus years at this point, is available and can be viewed on our website. So if you're interested in digging in, please check out the archive. How can you help support the work we do, bringing these in-depth articles, essays, and interviews with authors like Deborah to you? Well, there are a few ways. One, you can simply join Alta as a digital member for $3 a month, it'll give you access. Or you can become an official member of Alta Journal for just $50. You can get a year of the journal, the print journal, you can get a California book Club hat and Alta's Gift Guide to the Best Bookstores in the West, which is a book that we have produced. It's holiday time coming up. So check that out at altaonline.com/join.
I'm going to get out of the way now. It's a thrill to welcome Deborah, a huge talent. And I'm looking forward to the conversation. So at this point, let me turn this over to my colleague, John Freeman, and we will get underway. John?
John Freeman: Thank you, David. Hello everybody. It's nice to be back here. I'm so thrilled to be talking tonight to the poet, essayist, academic and memoirist, Deborah A. Miranda.
I think in the course of doing this book club together over the last three years, we've all come to some conclusions about what California is good at. And I think one of the things it has been good at in the last 20 years is using the first person story, the memoir, to retell important tales of California life. I think three of the best memoirs of the last 20 years in the United States include Maggie Nelson's Argonauts, Reyna Grande's The Distance Between Us, and I would very firmly say the book we're here to talk to Deborah about tonight, Bad Indians.
It is a deeply L.A. story. Deborah was born at UCLA. Her mother did some of the archival research, which led to this book at UCLA. And she wrote and almost completed this book, we'll talk to her about this later, at UCLA on a fellowship. Deborah is a member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation. She was born in 1960-something. Moved to Washington state when she was three and was raised apart from her mother.
And this book tells the story that I think lots of us will relate to in the sense that if you grew up in California, you probably were part of a continuation of the genocide of Indigenous People in the sense that you probably participated in what was called the Mission Project. The idea was to make papier-mâché models of one of the 21 missions, which existed in California between 1760 and 1833. And those missions were also deeply involved in the genocide of our Indigenous California Indians.
Deborah grew up living in the wake of that genocide. She grew up in the wake of many of the forms of inherited trauma that passed down from that. She's the author of several collections of poetry. But it wasn't until after her mother died that she inherited all the research her mother, who was white and who was born in Beverly Hills, began to do about their family, that she inherited this research and began to piece together a mosaic, a story, her own project, her own mission project, if you will.
I can't tell you how beautiful this book is, how much it inhabits many different forms of poetry, of lyric essay, of glossary, of faux anthropological research, of oral history, of investigation of oral history, of essays. Using first, second, and third person, it is a dazzling display of narrative technique. It is so beautiful. It is an offering. It is a workshop. It is a gift to us all.
And I think I would love to bring her out to talk about it right now. Deborah A. Miranda, please join us.
Deborah A. Miranda: Hello, John. Thanks for having me here.
Freeman: It is a great pleasure. Sorry if I've told you parts of your life story back to you. Now let's get it back to you because this book is so overwhelmingly brilliant in many different ways.
But it begins with some very simple and direct things, which is one of the scenes early on is you running into a little girl who's in the middle of that Mission Project and she's shocked to find in an actual Indian. And I found it really powerful the way that you decided that rather than say to people who had been participating in that project, "Hey, you're wrong." You invite them into your own project and say, "Hey, why don't you participate in this? Why don't you write down some of the things you know?"
And I guess I want to start with asking you how you created such an interactive text? One that looked at you as you were reading it as a reader and also invited you in at the same time.
Miranda: I have to say that the fact that I was doing research on communities that were really only represented by fragments in various archives had a lot to do with the fact that the book turned into this hybrid project that blends so many different genres and so many different kinds of research. So when I would find a really nice piece of material, it would kind of make me crazy that I didn't know the whole story, that I could only find one little comment or a repetitive name in the archives. And so I began to sort of write around those fragments and connect them to each other.
And at a certain point, I literally had everything up on the wall of this little studio I was renting in Westwood. And I just thought to myself, this is not a straightforward single narrative. What am I going to do? Nobody's ever going to publish this. But I decided to follow what the stories needed. And it kind of brought me back to that quote from Gloria Anzaldúa, that what she was creating in her work was "a mosaic." And that sometimes when you have fragments, and you're never going to have the whole thing, you're never going to get the whole piece, all the pieces you need to make something whole again. And that's pretty much what happened to California Indians. There's not a whole culture waiting to be returned to us or waiting for us to find in the archives.
When you lose 90% of your population in 100 years, that's like losing 1,000,000 libraries full of information. So I realized that what I needed to do was use the fragments I had, tell the stories they could tell and let the gaps speak as well, let the absences speak. And not try to sort of create a whole culture that I couldn't even begin to imagine. So when something started coming as a poem, I let it be a poem. When I found an incredible graphic, I decided, let me try to correct this, like correcting my daughter's coloring book about the missions. And I really had to listen to what the fragments had to say.
Freeman: I love that early on there's a found poem that is in the book. There's also erasures. Can you talk about using the language of the padres, if you will, of the Franciscan Catholic priests who were part of the mission? Some of their records to kind of crack open the archive a little bit to imagine, because I want to stress you're not creative non-fictionally telling stories throughout that overwhelm the research. You stay pretty close to the research, but you do have these moments where you use the language of the colonialists, if you will, to create light. And I thought that was just brilliant. I wanted to ask you about that.
Miranda: I can't remember how long ago it was, but Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird published an anthology called Reinventing the Enemy's Language. And I really thought about that as I was reading all of these colonizer archives and thinking about the fact that we don't have fluency in our native language. Although my sister Louise is doing an amazing job recovering that language, it's not there. And so how do I tell that Indigenous story in a non-Indigenous, in a colonizing language?
And what Harjo and Bird said was we have to reinvent it. We have to take English, or French, or Spanish, or whatever colonizing language it was and subvert it, find ways to make it work for us. Find ways to make that language Indigenous. And for me, that was the hybridity of the book. That was a way to reinvent English so that it could tell an Indigenous story.
And by using some of Serra's letters to other priests or using the Catholic prayer form of the novena, taking those things and pulling the Indigenous voices out of there. Those were really, really powerful moments for me as a writer when I realized that there was a text there that I didn't see at first, but that once I began to see the possibilities, then I could hear the Indigenous voices within them.
Freeman: You were mentioning Junípero Serra, who would typically have an out-sized role in a Mission Project. This book is full of people like Isabel Meadows and your ancestors who you encounter quite early in the archive. And I don't want to make a moment happen if it didn't, but was there a moment when you were in the stacks at UCLA with your research there and you said, "Holy," insert word, "that's my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather"?
Miranda: Yes. Yes, definitely, in one of Isabel's stories. I'm looking at the microfilm in this little room, and buzzing back and forth, and printing out the pages that I want. And I came across a story in which Isabel says, "One day there was a fox wandering through Carmel." And there was something wrong with it. It was sick. And Tomás Miranda ran and got an [foreign language 00:13:33] and shot it. And then a whole story about how they were going to make it into a kind of a [foreign language 00:13:40] a purse to carry things, sacred things.
But that was my grandfather's father, Tomás Miranda. And to see him in that context and to know that he was a member of that community, it was a moment of belonging, a moment of saying, "Yeah, I'm here. I'm in this story as well." And that story and then the story about Vicenta, the girl in Carmel in the 1830s. It's lent. She goes to the church to confess and she is attacked, sexually assaulted by the priest there. That was another story that really, really, it got me because I had been sexually assaulted as a young girl as well. And it made me think about murdered and missing Indigenous women and how there's a huge percent percentage of us. The technical percentage is one third, but in reality it's more like 100% who have to deal with that in our lives. And I just thought, wow, some things don't change. Being an Indigenous woman in a colonizing culture is a very dangerous place to be.
So, moments like that when I found relatives or when I found people whose lives resonated with my own, gave me a lot of impetus to continue the project even when it was really, really painful.
Freeman: Wow. That passage where Isabel Meadows is telling that story about the girl who was assaulted, you have the actual picture of the note, which I believe is in Harrington's hand, the man that to whom she told it almost 100 years later.
Miranda: Right.
Freeman: And I want to ask you about how you use, I don't want to call this ephemera, but in the research terms it might be called that. When you put pictures in there, when you put sort of pictures of the actual handwritten notes, it's very powerful, but I wonder how you decided what to do that for and where? Because I imagine that could have made this a book two or three times as long as it is.
Miranda: Yes. At a certain point I had a whole file called "Spawn of Bad Indians," and those stories became actual scholarly articles because I just had so much to say about them. But I included the Harrington notes A, because I don't think of them as Harrington notes. I think them of them as Isabel's stories. And B, because I wanted people to see what I had seen. I wanted to have that impact of wow, he's writing down what she's saying and what she's saying is blowing me away.
Freeman: The way that she says it. When I read that, I thought it was as if it happened yesterday. And there's something about the way, I too when I read it, it was like Harrington was transcribing Meadows who had the exact words of this girl in her head for as long as... And what is it, do you think, about the way that she tells it that makes it so immediate?
Miranda: Isabel, I think felt this story very deeply. When I thought about it, I realized she must have gotten this story from her mother because this happened before Isabel was born, long before. And so we have this story of this young girl passed from Isabel's mother, Loretta, to Isabel, to Harrington, to me. And then through this book out to a whole new generation of Indigenous women who needed to hear that we can tell, that we do not have to remain silent with our pain or with our trauma, and that we have the power to speak out against this kind of oppression.
So it was probably one of the most difficult stories to write. And so I wanted to include that handwritten note that says the words, "He grabbed the girl and screwed her," because Isabel did not sugarcoat this. And I think what I say in the book is, "I think she decided, everybody's telling me that we're the last ones, that we're going to die out and there won't be any Indians left." And I think she actually believed that because things were so bad in the Monterey/Carmel area at that time for Indians.
And I think she just thought, I've got one shot at telling people what really happened. I'm not going to blow it. And I think she did kind of see Harrington coming and say, "Ah, here's the man who's going to write down these stories that I have in my head." Because she never married. She did not have her own children. She did help raise several nieces and nephews. But there was no one in the community who was willing to take on her role as the storyteller, as the person who preserved all of this information. And so here she was in her eighties wondering, what am I going to do with this really important material? And here comes somebody who writes down everything you say. So I do think that in their partnership, it was in many ways a very equal partnership between equals, that her status was equal to his status.
Freeman: And he desperately obviously needed to know what she knew. I have so much admiration for the way that you modulate the various stories within this book, and one of the ways you do it is through persona poems, through kind of raising a figure and coming back to them. You mentioned your great-grandfather, Tomás, but I think your grandfather was also named Tomás. And we get to see his photograph, I believe.
And so you create these loops and patterns in which we can see how stories are passed, but also terrible things that were introduced to Indians, violence. As you point out, the Central Coast Indians that you're writing about did not beat each other, did not beat their children, but they learned to do that in the missions. And you have a kind of glossary of and description of all the different tools of violence, including the cat o' nine tails, which 200 pages later you talk about your father's abuse of his other children and the anguish that you feel as you watch that pass.
I wonder if you can read something from the early part of the book in that period where there's definitions? I think you said you could maybe read from the Padre section.
Miranda: Yes.
Freeman: Because I think those definitions bear fruit across the entirety of the book.
Miranda: So in the little section that is a glossary, I have a piece called Padre, and this is how I define what a padre was. And this is in the voice of an Indian who is living in the mission.
Padre. The Padre baptized us, gave us names and godparents. He taught us our catechism. Officiated at our First Communion. Posted our marriage bands. Performed our weddings. Baptized our babies. Administered Last Rites. Listened to our confessions. He punished us when we prayed to the wrong gods, or tired of our wives or husbands. He taught us to sing. Our own songs were ugly. He taught us to speak. Our own languages were nonsensical. He made us wear clothes. Our bodies were shameful. He gave us wheat and the plow. Our seeds and acorns were fit only for animals. Yes, that padre, he was everything to us Indians. At the giving end of a whip, he taught us to care for and kill cattle, work fields of wheat and corn and barley, make adobe walls for our own prison, build the church, the store rooms. Promised it all to us if we would just grow up, pray hard enough, forget enough.
But it all went to Spain, to Rome, to Mexico. Into the pockets of merchants, smugglers, priests, dishonest administrators, and finally, the cruel Americans. Nothing left for the children the padre had worked so hard to civilize. Poor savages pulled from the fires of certain Hell. He was our shepherd. We were his beloved and abused flock. Now the fields are eaten down to the earth. We claw the earth, yet even the roots are withered and the shepherd has gone away. But we are pagans no more. Now we are Christian [foreign language 00:23:29], Christian housekeepers, Christian blacksmiths and shoemakers, and laundry women, and wet nurses and handymen. None of us paid with more than a meal, or a shirt, or a pair of discarded boots. But Christians. Poor Christians, drunken Christians. Meek targets for 49ers crazed by gold lust or ranchers hungry for land.
We are homeless Christians, starving Christians, diseased and landless Christians. We are Christian slaves bought and sold in newspapers on auction blocks in San Francisco and Los Angeles. $100 for a likely girl. $50 for an able-bodied boy. Free to whoever bails the old man out of jail. Every one of us baptized by the padre, our primitive souls snatched from this Hell our bodies cannot escape. We are Christian, we are Catholic, we are saved by the padres. And for that, Jesus Christ, we must be grateful.
Freeman: I mean, every section of the book is in many ways that powerful. I wanted to point out that there's a listener who's fifth generation Chumash from OCEN land in Monterey. And there are a lot of Native people in the audience right now.
I wonder if while we're talking, if you could say anything about what it means to find yourself within a larger community of Native writers. Last night, a Native writer won the National Book Award in nonfiction, Ned Blackhawk. A Native writer from Guam, won the National Book Award in poetry, Craig Santos Perez, who's a wonderful poet. And we're in the middle of a moment of Native storytelling in all different forms in the literary arts.
What does it feel like to be part of this? And what do you hope as a writer yourself? What could you say to people having spent 20 years on this book that might help them along?
Miranda: Oh my goodness, this moment feels long overdue, I have to say. I think Joy Harjo says something like, "The Indigenous literature of this land is the literature of America, and it has long been ignored or discouraged."
I want to make it clear, it is still very, very difficult for an Indigenous author to get published. And once you are published, you still need people to read your work, to analyze it, to, in some ways, bring it into the academy so that it has a farther reach. But you also need to find a way to get your book out to the general public. And that's also very difficult because generally we get published by small publishers, right? Heyday published Bad Indians, and they are a very regional, small press. But it was a very conscious decision on my part because I wanted this book to be there for California Indians. And I knew Hay heyday would do it right and that they would have the connections.
So that's not to take anything away from anyone who is winning the National Book Award, yay, all right? But I just want to say that it's still a very tough road. And events like this, the last month of Alta publishing stories in their hard copy, and then basically every week releasing another story about Bad Indians, that is probably more press than this book has gotten in the last 10 years. And it was very gratifying to see the ancestors honored that way.
So in terms of encouraging other Indigenous writers, I was telling some students this morning, this is our time. This is a moment when we can have our voices communicated with the rest of the world and let's not compromise on any of it. Let's tell it like Isabel did. Let's tell everything, the good, the bad, the ugly. But let's remember that we are working on an Indigenous culture and that we are not looking for revenge. We're looking for a future, an Indigenous future.
Freeman: This is a great segue in which I can bring in Cutcha Risling Baldy, who's the chair of the Native American Studies Department at Cal Poly Humboldt and the author of We Are Dancing for You. And she's going to ask you some further questions, Deborah and I'll pop back in after about 10 minutes.
Miranda: Okay. Hey, Cutcha.
Cutcha Risling Baldy: Hi. Thank you, everyone. Really happy to be here and joining you today from [foreign language 00:28:50] or among the redwoods in very far northern California. I think just really honored to be invited to be a part of a conversation with Deborah Miranda. I first read the book Bad Indians in Graduate School. And I remember after we read it, we had been reading a lot of really heavily historical scholarly texts. And we came into class after reading Bad Indians, and two of the students that were in the class just looked at me and they were like, "Finally. Finally the book we've been looking for as Native women trying to get our PhDs and do this work of writing and telling stories." And we just felt like this great sense of relief that there was this work there that could model for us, that there was something else that we could do to tell these stories about our peoples, and our histories, and our ancestors.
And I think that's something that I've been really thinking about lately, Deborah, is, so I'm on sabbatical this year. I'm actually not the chair right now. I'm on sabbatical. And we talk a little bit amongst other people that do a lot of this kind of work that because there's still not very many of us, a lot of us don't get opportunities to take sabbaticals or do periods of time where we can really rest and walk away from all the stuff that always has to be done, both as Indigenous women, as mothers, as aunties, as community members, as people who are constantly looking around and seeing how we want to make sure the world is balanced the way it should be. And so we don't get a lot of time to rest, and relax, and take care of ourselves and each other.
And then I also was, I've really been thinking about lately this title, Bad Indians. And I keep thinking when they were talking about what's a bad Indian, when we talk about what it means to be a bad Indian, I really think about the people that we work with, the people we know and how I would call them bad Indians. I would be like, "You are a bad Indian because you're constantly coming in and being like, 'No to the settler state.' And you're saying, 'No, I'm not going to do it this way.'"
And I didn't know if maybe you wanted to explain a little bit about the title. I just think, to me, it's such an important conversation for us to start having about what it really means to be a bad Indian, especially then and then today.
Miranda: Right. Well, obviously during mission times, the padres used this phrase over and over in their letters to each other and in their records they would say, "So-and-so is a bad Indian, he keeps stealing cattle. So-and-so is a bad Indian, she won't stay home with her husband, she sleeps around." Bad Indians were people who refused to submit in some important way to the Spanish agenda and did not want to be quote, unquote, "converted" or "saved." They were perfectly content being who they were.
And I think that all coalesced in my head when I found the news article that had this headline. It was from 1909, the L.A. Times. And it said, "Bad Indian goes on Rampage in Santa Ynez." And the man who went on a rampage was Juan Miranda. And I want to say this was not the Miranda family that I'm from, even though they're from my grandmother's town. But they were my relatives in a different way, in a sense that I love how the story goes that Juan emerges from the cabin with his rifle, and then his wife emerges with her pistol, and then his daughter emerges with her gun. And it was just like this absolute act of badness, of just resisting. Because what happens is the constable and the sheriff are there, so they're really resisting the law and these unjust laws that have made them become bad in some ways.
So I thought about the fact that I am here, I am writing this information, I'm doing this research, I'm creating this book because of the Indians who were bad. Because of the ones who resisted and refused to submit, and lived long enough to have someone I could be descended from, which was not easy when the age expectancy of a child in the missions was seven years old. So living to adulthood and having a child, sometimes was as far as my family tree went for one person. But they had a child and that child survived and had a child, and so on.
So I was telling all of this to my son, Danny, one night and explaining to him, "Let me tell you about your ancestors. Let me tell you how bad so-and-so was." And after a while he looked at me and he said, "Mom, our ancestors weren't just bad Indians. They were badass." And I thought, that's it. That's what I'm trying to say. They had an incredible instinct for survival and they had attitude, and that was what saved us.
Baldy: And I think what I also love about it too is that sometimes we tell stories through history of fantastical folks or big people that we would say were famous or people everybody knew. When you get these stories of people, everyday people who were resisting, who were like, "No, I'm not going to do it that way." And I think the important way that it was a consistent practice of people to say, "I can say no. I can resist what's happening here." And being just an individual, they're part of the community, they're part of the family, and they're not necessarily political leaders or people who are in the spaces with other folks like governors or policymakers. They're everyday folks who are saying, "This is how I'm going to push back against this system."
And what I love about it too, so when we think about bad Indians in general as you enter into the space of the text, you also talk about the story that you internalized about Native people that really came from how we teach about Native people in elementary school and high school, and how Native people are written about in the archive, the words that are used. And so you talk about not just that we're bad, but we're also lazy, and we also don't do any, we're shiftless and we also don't have a whole culture. We're so primitive.
And I'm always talking to people about, "Have you heard people say things about California Natives? Like they were primitive hunter-gatherers?" And everybody will say, "Yeah, that's what I've always learned." And then when you start looking at what they're calling primitive, I'm really thinking about it now as they're like, "They're so primitive. All they do is sit around and enjoy their lives. And they've been able to make crops that don't need a lot of tending to them. And they make fields that don't need a lot of tending. And so they're not working every day, so there's something wrong with them."
And then I think about where we're at right now, where, and I think about that theft of labor, the way that they take from us our ability to rest, relax, and share stories, and laugh, and love, and dream and sing songs. And-
Miranda: They didn't count all the effort that went into pursuing power, or pursuing the sacred, or performing ceremony. All the effort that that went into. And some of it looked like sitting around. They didn't realize that's what was happening at all. And if they did, when they saw dancing or when they heard singing, they immediately banned it.
Baldy: So if you were going to take the story where you're saying you learned them as shiftless, lazy, primitive, how would you tell people, what is the actual story that you would want to tell about California Indians? What is the thing you want people to really step away and be like, oh, it's not lazy, shiftless primitive hunter-gatherers, it's this?
Miranda: That our lives were very intentional. That our lives were the result of thousands and thousands of years of figuring out how to live in relationship with a lot of other people and with the land that we lived on. And that this was the whole key, that we had expertise, we had ways of knowing. That people, that Americans and Europeans are now trying to reclaim, like prescribed burns. Like different ways of having a relationship with the land. These are things that are now coming back around as, oh, this is what's going to save the planet. So what I want people to know is we already had that. We already knew that. And you tried to erase it. You tried not only to erase it, but to erase it violently and with no compunction for were these babies, were these women, were these children, were these men? You didn't care. This knowledge was so dangerous, you thought, that you had to exterminate us. And guess what? We're still here. And we're still working for the same things so get on board.
Baldy: I also really like to take apart, and I use your book a lot for this, to really take apart this idea that somehow the missions were a civilizing place. They were trying to, and that padres and missionaries were very smart and they knew better than native people. There's so many important moments where you realize, like I use an example all the time of missions that were built on top of fault lines and the way that Native people, they were like, "Look at these Native people. They didn't build anything in this beautiful area that overlooks this canyon." And the Native people were like, "Yeah, because it's all going to fall down. You guys can build it there, but it's all going to fall down." And then to think about-
Miranda: Floodplains.
Baldy: ... actually who built the missions. The floodplains, the way that they're like, "Oh, nobody built it." And you're like, "Yeah, because we're working with the land itself."
And I think even taking apart who actually built the missions, the idea being that it was like the padres come in, and they have all the knowledge and they're the ones that figure it out. And I don't know. I hope if people take a look at the book, they really look at the mission glossary because it does a couple of really important things I think. The first is it does this thing that California Indians do that I love, which is it plays with the way that people talk about us, but being the person to finally be able to write a real mission glossary. And then it also pushes back against the terminology of how people talk about the missions.
And I don't know if you can talk a little bit about what it was like to create your mission glossary. I actually had a good friend of mine that had a first copy of a like hand stitched copy of the mission glossary that you made that was signed. And he was like, "Here, I want to give this to you because you're doing this panel." And I was just like, "Oh my gosh, look at this." And this kind of start of that, I didn't know if you wanted to talk a little bit about that.
Miranda: I went and visited a lot of missions when I was in California. And I have continued to do that over the years. And to enter every mission, what you have to do is go through the gift shop. And the docents there ask you, quote, unquote, "ask you for a donation." And they will not let you into the mission unless you make that donation. I have to say, my sister, Louise, is champion of saying, "No. Not paying you. Already paid enough." But the thing about the mission gift stores is that they still have these little pamphlets that were made in the forties, I think, that have these kind of weird glossaries that do just what you were saying, "The Indians were happy to see the padres, the missions were built in," blah, blah, blah, giving a year. But that passive voice not explaining that it was actually the Indians who carried those heavy adobes and built those buildings.
So I was very frustrated with this presentation of indigeneity. And I decided I'm going to write my own glossary from an Indigenous perspective. And I am very much a fan of handmade books. So I went ahead and bought some special paper and started sewing these books, and adding a little abalone and shell to the string that I was using. And I remember James Luna, rest in peace, said to me, "Let's make a bunch of these and sneak them into all the missions." I wish we could have done that, but it's kind of sneaking into the missions in other ways.
But I wanted to, in some ways it was anger. I wanted to say, "Oh, no. This is not what happened. Let me tell you what really happened." And so when it came to actually constructing a manuscript for the book, I decided at first I wanted to just have photographs of the pages in the pamphlet that I'd made, but we decided that having the glossary kind of seamlessly worked into the manuscript would look better and feel better.
But I still would like to hand out those little books at the mission. I think that the power behind them is that they take what looks so familiar to so many generations of Californians, and just gives it this huge Indigenous twist and really makes you think, wait a minute, what did I think adobes were? What did I think the priests were doing? What about the fact that all of these Indigenous People had their own names? They didn't need Spanish names. What about this? What about that? And I really wanted that pamphlet to just get into people's minds and not let them go.
Baldy: And I do think with students too, what I've noticed is it highlights for people that glossaries are not unpolitical spaces. That you can kind of think of a definition as it's just the definition of the word and not a political space or decision. And it sort of says, "Look what happens when you start to see a different perspective, a different voice, a voice that you probably wouldn't have heard from making a glossary and a definition of the word."
Miranda: Reinventing the Enemy's Language. Yep.
Freeman: Oh, Cutcha. That was a brilliant set of questions and we'll bring you back very shortly.
But I wanted to dip back in here, Deborah. I have the peculiar and wonderful book ended timeline of the last week in which a week ago I was with Linda Hogan in Denver. And she was reading poems and she was talking about studying, as she put it, our astronomy. Relearning Native astronomy. And as a knowledge system, it seems just full of enlarging ideas, and senses of wonder, and stories, and life and culture.
And you have a quote in here that's quite familiar to many people who've read Linda Hogan, which is, "You are the result of the love of thousands." And I think one of the things you do in this book is without thinking you can restore everything, you restore love to the story of California Indians in the sense that Juan Miranda, the OG bad Indian, he was probably stealing because he had many children.
And you are constantly rewriting into the stories across the book, whether it's your family or people who could have been your family, ways in which love plays a part. You described your father who was a very complicated man, and we'll get to that in a second. But that he loved cooking. And he was raised in Santa Monica, and so he was always making chorizo and Mexican food. And he was always doing domestic things after he returned from San Quentin where he had spent eight years.
And I don't want to over-egg the idea that love conquers forms of trauma. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about restoring spaces of care, acts of love, unseen and unrecordable acts to the history that you're trying to tell? And how love could be a kind of knowledge system that you're also trying to acknowledge as part of the mosaic of pessimism.
Miranda: Yes. Well, one of the things that happened to us in the missions was this destruction of family and destruction of knowing how to have relationships, because it was difficult to maintain close relationships when girls from seven to marriageable age or married were locked up at night and separated from their parents. It was difficult for spouses to maintain relationships when they were forced oftentimes into marriage or forced to have child after child after child, which was not an Indigenous practice. A more Indigenous practice was to have a child and wait a few years, and then have another child. But when you put this kind of pressure on a marriage to have eight or 10, or one of my relatives had 21 children, it tears apart the ability for a couple to maintain the things they have to maintain.
So I think were, I think similar to what happened in boarding schools, the ability to form deep, close, resilient relationships and the ability to have compassion for one another is something that was literally beaten out of us. And also became not a good survival strategy in some ways because it made you very vulnerable.
So I think that one of the things that happened for me in writing this book was a huge learning curve for what compassion really is. The compassion that I learned to have for my ancestor, Ventura, who was a cantor in the church but was blinded. And then lost his wife when she left him and then lost all of his relatives to death. And then became somebody who self-medicated with alcohol and was sometimes violent with other people. I found myself really loving this man, but also realizing he had all the same problems that my father did. On one hand, he was very talented musically and linguistically, and on the other hand, he did not know how to handle the stress and the destruction that was happening in his life. And my ability to feel compassion for what he'd been through and yet still hold him accountable just as I tried to do with my father.
Knowing that this kind of masculinity had been taught, had been beaten into men in the missions, gave me the ability to stand back and say, "I can still see you as a young child in the mission. I can still see you, Dad, as a young boy whose dad and grandfather had him delivering their hooch, their beer or their alcohol in his little red wagon." And then they paid him in alcohol when he was eight years old.
So I think what I learned was that as a community, we needed to grow in compassion without letting go of the accountability that we need for each other. And the compassion went two ways, not just towards Ventura or towards my father, but towards myself for wanting to love Indigenous men who have deeply flawed issues, for wanting to be loved by them.
I think there was a point in my life when I was actually ashamed that I still loved my father, and angry with myself that I couldn't let go of that. And writing the book helped me see how deep this dysfunction went, not just for our family, but for a whole community.
So missions were not a kind place. They did not teach people how to love or how to establish relationships with other people or with homelands. And that's a whole nother issue of learning how to reconnect and establish these caring relationships with the lands where we live.
Freeman: One of the most beautiful words in this book is [foreign language 00:51:15]. And it comes up a little bit more towards the end of the book in which I feel like you begin to expand what the word means maybe, or you begin to become more comfortable using it. And I wonder if you could talk about that word?
Miranda: Can you tell me again what it was? You glitched just a little bit.
Freeman: Oh, sorry. The word I would say I-C-H-I. How do you pronounce that, itchy?
Miranda: And it means sister, this bond. One of the things that happened with the writing of this book was my reconnection with my older sister, Louise, who is the Chair of the Esselen Nation. We had been separated for most of my life. My older sisters, half sisters, sometimes didn't even know where I was when we moved to Washington state.
But with the efforts that the tribe was making to earn re-recognition, not recognition but re-recognition, from the federal government, that meant that she contacted my father. And I was drawn into back into a Native community for the first time in my life. And that word [foreign language 00:52:37] has come between us, I think really means we claim that bond no matter what happened, how we were separated from each other and how we had different childhoods. This word means [foreign language 00:52:52] we are working towards the same goal. And we each bring different gifts to it, but it is the same goal, which is whatever is good for our community.
Freeman: I believe one of your sisters, one of your relatives used that word in the chat.
Miranda: Yeah, I didn't see it but it's probably Louise.
Freeman: I'm going to bring Cutcha back. And while Cutcha's rejoining us, there's a question from the audience about if you could recommend a reading list that would broaden, deepen, and continue the experience of your book? I think it's meant a lot to many of the readers.
Miranda: Okay. Well, all I have to do is look over here at my bookshelf. It's a whole, these are all my California books. And I would definitely recommend Cutcha's book, We Are Dancing for You. I think that that is one of my inspirations. And Cutcha has done a beautiful job of, she and her mother, reclaiming this coming of age ceremony for young women in a way that makes their lives matter, makes their wellbeing as young women matter. And again, when you look at the statistics for missing and murdered Indigenous women, that is not something that we learn in this culture. So to revive that ceremony and have women going through it, both the women who run it and the women who experiencing it, that goes back to what you were saying, John, about the love and the deep, deep connections that a ceremony like that can bring to people. So definitely that book.
Cutcha, what would you recommend?
Baldy: I mean, the first thing I would say is have you read every other article that's been written by Deborah Miranda?
Miranda: Aw.
Baldy: Because there's a lot of really great articles that we use a lot to expand on things that people are talking about that come from archive. I think Deborah's led the way in our conversation about how do we reclaim the archive? How do we go into those spaces and do this work as Indigenous People? I use Extermination of the Joyas a lot, which is a really good article, especially if you are interested in expanding your understanding of queer folks and what happens with community peoples through colonization. And then thinking about what that means for us today as we push for decolonization.
And I love that article too, because it really demonstrates how Indigenous Peoples have had to consistently not just resist through education and not just resist through the mission system, but the idea that they could criminalize peoples in our communities that were important members of our vision for why we kept this type of forwarding diversity of experience, and peoples, and folks, and voices.
And it really led, I think, for a lot of people down a path of if you're thinking about California Indian Scholarship, to really think about the ways that women's voices are being uplifted through that kind of scholarship. I saw somebody had suggested in the chat, Know We Are Here, which is a new text that was just published. If you want to hear all kinds of California Indian voices that are writing and making these stories known, this is a really great collection of work that has come from News from Native California. And if you don't know News from Native California, that's a magazine that's published out of Heyday books. And I would highly recommend getting a subscription to that. That's a place where you're going to really see a lot of California Indian voices publishing, writing. There's poetry, there's recipes, there's stories, there's all kinds of things that have come from that publication as well.
Miranda: I have to agree. Heyday, look at their catalog. They have long privileged California Indigenous voices, but also allies. And I think that allies can be something that often get overlooked, but allies are doing really, really good work out there as well.
Freeman: I think we have time for about one more question. I just want to point out to everyone who's been listening, if you want to scroll back up in the chat you can find a link on bookshop.org to buy Cutcha's book. And there's some other recommendations for what people are reading.
I don't want to bring the current news in-
Miranda: Can I say one more thing?
Freeman: Yeah, of course.
Miranda: I did put this link in the chat. I hope people saw it. One thing that can stop people from getting a lot of information if they're not in an academic institution are the paywalls that you hit when you're trying to research. Sometimes you can get through them by going to your local library if they have a membership. But I have been trying to put all of my articles on something called academia.edu so that they're available without a paywall, and you can download them directly from there. So just look up my name there. I know some people have issues with that website, but if it makes it free, then I'm really happy about it. Sorry, go ahead.
Freeman: Oh, well actually we have time for probably 30 seconds. And I just want to ask you, because this book was updated about a year ago. This is a 10-year anniversary update. It does feel like something you could update for the rest of your life in a way-
Miranda: It does.
Freeman: ... which I kind of hope you do because I hope this book is endless. But I also would love to know if you are writing other books, more poetry? What can we expect next from you? Because the range of forms in here says to me that you have much to give still.
Miranda: Well, I'm still writing poetry. I do have a chatbook coming out from Seven Kitchens Press called Pilgrimage. I'm working on a book of poems that are explorations of Esselen words in English.
But the book that I've been working on for a long time now is a collection of essays based on Isabel Meadows stories. And that's where those essays that Cutcha was talking about, that's where they're headed. And so my most recent essay is working on California missions and experiences of Indigenous masculinities within those missions. What happened to men and what we can learn from that. And it's like as with the women's stories, they're not happy stories, but they are a kind of teaching that I think Sara Ahmed says that "Scars are teachers in a way." And you don't want to erase them or hide them even if they were painful because they still have something to teach you and they tell you where you've been. In some ways, they're testimonies. So Ventura's story is very painful, but I think very important.
Freeman: Well, I hope there are teachers out there listening to us tonight. I hope if you are watching this on video later that you take this book and adopt it as the better Mission Project that could be used in schools. As Deborah points out in the end of her book, in 2016 the California Legislature started talking about the fact that the Mission Project should end, but it still persists in gift shops and other ways. And thank you for this book.
And Cutcha Risling Baldy, thank you for joining us. This was an amazing conversation.
It was great to have both of you here, and I hope we can have you back in some other capacity when your next book is out, Deborah. Thank you very much.
Miranda: Always bring me back with Cutcha, I'll come. Thank you so much. And hello and thank you to Indians everywhere. So many Indians.
Baldy: Wow.
Ulin: Thank you, Deborah. Thank you, Cutcha. And thank you, John. A fantastic conversation. I second John, if you're a teacher, please assign this book. I have, and really I urge you to do that.
The interview was recorded and will be up on californiabookclub.com. Next month on the California Book Club, we'll be discussing Carribean Fragoza's short story collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You. So please, you don't want to miss that. I want to remind you about the Alta membership, altaonline.com/join, or again, the $3 digital membership. Please participate in a two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as we end the event.
Take care everybody. Stay safe and we will see you all next month. Thank you very much.•
