A review by nmcannon
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir by Deborah A. Miranda

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

I honestly don’t remember where I first heard of Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. It might have been my college’s class on indigenous people. Regardless, I knew I needed to read Miranda’s memoir. It was necessary for my personal improvement as well as my current solarpunk Los Angeles writing project.

As advertised in the blurb, Bad Indians stitches and shifts genre the same way Miranda must stitch and shift identities to survive. Primary historical sources are woven in with her stories and her poetry when prose can’t capture the pain. Grief, rage, and forced resilience are volatile themes. I really got a sense of how little time has passed since the colonial apocalypse. The intergenerational pain is still ongoing. Even the dedication–“To my parents, who survived each other”–made me pause and think. Other “oh!” moments were plentiful. The relationship between anthropologists and indigenous communities is fraught and strange. Scholars exploited elders for academic cred. New indigenous generations mine these scholars’ works for their own histories, because their pretentious papers are often the only surviving records. My history classes skipped over the fact that indigenous people were sold into slavery after the collapse of the mission system. Wtf, teachers.

A sizeable chunk of the book focused on the elementary school mission project. For those unfamiliar, in California, elementary schoolers create book reports and sometimes dioramas of a chosen mission. In my school, the project had some taint of sadness: both because of the massive indigenous death tolls and because, as a white person, our colonial coming destroyed this type of community. It was a strange place to inhabit, and Miranda’s insights made it even stranger. I’m definitely against the mission project now.

With Miranda’s compassionate rage and sorrowful determination, Bad Indians is an incisive read, if painful at times due to the subject matter. It feels like a Californian successor to Ma-Nee Chacaby’s A Two Spirit Journey autobiography. I’m filled with a new drive for justice that needs to be done. I really want to read Miranda’s other works. 
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