BAD INDIANS IN THE WORLD

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L to R:  Andy Smith, me, Dian's book, Dian Million, Jennifer Denetdale after Dian's book panel at Critical Ethnic Studies Association conference in Chicago, 2013

Hard to say goodbye to friends at the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference here in Chicago, but good to be heading home. 

So much to process.  So much work to do.  So many good human beings out there doing it!

Throughout the last few days, I have talked to many people who are teaching Bad Indians right now, all over the country. 

Pause.

Did I just write that?  yes, I did.  People are teaching  Bad Indians in universities around this country, and in Canada. 

Pause again, while the skeletons in museums get up and dance.

Hearing from these professors, what they see happening in the book on both literary and theoretical levels, responses from students, is heartening, exciting.  I’m so proud of those Ancestors whose stories are being told, whose actions and words are changing colonial mythologies and re-writing histories and taking root in a new generation.  Thank you, colleagues, for trusting this book to be included in your classrooms.

And along with the news from classrooms, something that I did not anticipate: the problematics of being an Indian professor who has survived violence but now must teach about it.  Teaching the book is often a trigger, particularly for women.

Of course it is.  But I could not see this until Jennifer Denetdale brought it to my attention.  I had completely denied this possible and quite reasonable reaction in all of my imaginings about Bad Indians in the world.

I worried about critics.  I worried about student reaction to having their knowledge about history and the U.S. Government being mercilessly challenged.  I worried about family responses.  I worried about Catholic Natives for whom the book might seem sacrilegious or disrespectful.  But curiously (especially as a Native woman who has survived violence and sexual violation), it never crossed my mind to worry about something that now seems obvious: It is hard enough for Native professors to claim authority in the classroom, for many reasons; who wants, on top of that, to feel vulnerable and fragile, in front of one's students? to cry in front of them, or to get angry?

And yet, as Jennifer repeatedly told me, the book must be taught.

In many conversations over the past few days, my colleagues and I faced this dilemma head on, with an honesty and passion and frustration that I can only appreciate and thank them for giving me.  We’ve decided to talk more about it, via email, and perhaps plan a pedagogy panel about teaching texts in which violence (especially against women and children) is portrayed and demands an intimacy from us in order to be discussed with students. 

There is, it seems, something about Bad Indians that brings old memories to the surface in a way that violence portrayed in fiction or even autobiographical poetry does not, particularly for Indian women.  I am still sitting with this knowledge and information, and it will take a long time for me to unpack my own feelings about this.  My initial response was horror.  And shock.  And forehead-smacking:  my own response to trauma has always been to internalize it, compartmentalize it into writing, where I am in control, where I decide what gets said or unsaid, written or unwritten – or at least, I can pretend I control that (as I’ve said before, writers often have no idea what we are unleashing from our depths until the words are already out there - and sometimes, this is a way of protecting ourselves from even more trauma).  I honestly feel horrified that I have “done” this to my colleagues, to the dear and brilliant Indian women teaching this book.  What kind of person would do that? 

Here I am, caught between being an author, and a loving community member.

But the book had to be written, and those stories had to be told, and as my colleagues at CESA have told me, they want to teach them.  They just feel unprepared for the way it hits them in the middle of the gut, in the middle of the classroom.

We need to talk about this.  And we did, and we will continue that conversation via email and phone and skype.  We have thrown some ideas around: a panel about the pedagogical aspects of teaching about violence that hits home.  Sharing techniques.  How to teach our truths brilliantly and yet not forget self-care.  How, as Dian Million says her new book Therapeutic Nations which we celebrated at the conference, not to get trapped in “the place where Indigenous women are posed as the abject victimized subjects of our present neoliberal states.”  How to walk into our classrooms in our Indian bodies claiming our experiences fully, and teach the truth about violence in our communities without being swallowed up by grief or casting a false, pathetic image of what survival looks like. 

This is a fierce charge.

I think I’m glad that Bad Indians is a good place to start this conversation. That little hesitation in my voice exists because it seems, in some ways, a frightening place to be, to have positioned myself.  And yet, as always, I am sure about the ways the Ancestors are guiding me.  I feel sure that I am feeling my way along this path in ways that, as I said during our panel on Sovereign Erotics, are reaching toward balance and away from fear.  It’s a felt knowledge, as Million says: something not always honored by others as real knowledge.

My first task is to finish reading Therapeutic Nations.  And then, I am certain, entering into a conversation with other Native professors and scholars that will change and clarify and re-charge how we do what it is we do.

Seen at Pt. Reyes bookstore

My colleague and amazing writer Jasmin Darznik (The Good Daughter) took this shot of Bad Indians while in California recently.  Those Bad Indians are keeping some good company these days.

9 more days until the Bad Indians January Book Tour begins!  Click on the "Readings & Reviews" tab above to see where I'll be reading in January.

Writing Bad Indians: A Short History of a Long Project

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Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir ... In some ways, it feels as if I have been writing this book all my life.  I was born in Los Angeles, the only child of Alfred Miranda, an Esselen-Chumash man, and Madgel Miranda, a woman of European ancestry.  

Mom, me, Dad circa 1962

When I was three, my parents divorced.  My mother remarried when I was five and we moved to Washington State after I finished kindergarten.  Those first five years in California remained a crucial part of my identity.  In Washington, I was the only Indian kid in any of my classes for the rest of my public school career.  I looked different, I felt different, and I knew from the silences and absences in and around me that I had lost something, something I could not describe but which, to myself, I called “home,” and the ache itself inside me, “homesick.”

Home (with Duffy, our bull mastiff, on guard), circa 1969.

For most of my remaining childhood, we lived in an old trailer in the woods on the outskirts of Kent, Washington.  We’d always been low-income, but after my step-father and mother divorced when I was ten, my mom and I went on welfare, struggling to get by.  My mother was a strong and intelligent woman who came into her strengths late in life, earning an Associate’s Degree in Librarian Sciences from Highline Community College and landing a full-time job at KOMO-TV in Seattle as a Videotape Librarian.   

By that time, at thirteen years of age, I expressed a longing to know my father and my California Indian relatives; thanks to my mother’s example, I was also beginning to imagine going to college myself someday.  Knowing she could never afford a four-year university tuition on her own, my mother contacted my father, asking for his help in putting together my genealogy.  She hoped that the BIA would issue a blood quantum decision that would allow me to apply for scholarships open to Native Americans.  

 I think my mother also sensed my hunger for the other half of my heritage – my father, older half-sisters, aunties and uncles and cousins who looked like me, and a homeland whose towns, streets, mountains, rivers and beaches I could name, but had only gone back to visit once or twice.

She had no idea that she was walking into the hornet’s nest that was and still is the BIA, but then my mother was always tougher than she looked.  Thanks to the BIA’s epic, bureaucratic, and historic dysfunction, my mother became what she called an “accidental genealogist.” Fortunately, it turned out to be her life’s passion, and Madgel Miranda turned out to be a tenacious researcher.  This hunt also reconnected me with my Indian father (in fact, he moved to Washington and my parents reunited for a time; even though that didn’t work out, my father lived nearby the rest of his life), my little (half) brother Al, and that side of my family, and introduced us all to the on-going reformation of the Esselen Nation and the work towards Federal Recognition.  

Although I eventually earned a B.S. in Special Needs Teaching from Wheelock College in Boston (1983), I still felt my primary work in the world was as a writer.  After teaching for five years, I returned to the Seattle area and began raising two children of my own as well as writing and publishing poetry; finally, in 1995, I applied to the University of Washington’s Graduate English Department.

My mother died in November 2001 from lung cancer, just five months after she and my father saw me graduate with my Ph.D. in English Literature at the age of 40. Long since separated but still bound together by love, history and blood, my parents had sat together at the UW’s Native student graduation feast and ceremony in the Daybreak Star lodge, along with my two children.  

 My mother’s death was an unexpected blow – she was only 66, just retired, and the cancer had snuck up on her without warning.  No, she never was able to get me that BIA stamp of approval, and I graduated with big student loans to pay back.  But my mother left behind my real inheritance: a relationship with my father (no matter how fraught with conflict, it was still a relationship that helped me form my identity as a Native woman), about ten banker’s boxes full of painstaking research, and an amazing family tree that goes back to some of the first Native converts at Mission Carmel in 1770.  

Three years after my mother’s death, these boxes followed me from my first teaching job at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma to my new job at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where I began having dreams about the ancestors whose were lives chronicled in reams of documentation.  Also in those boxes rattled a handful of old cassette tapes featuring my grandfather, Thomas Anthony Miranda, which my mother had started to transcribe but was unable to complete.

Thomas Anthony Miranda, circa 1955

            Originally, I began to finish the transcription of those stories as a way to feel close to my mother, whom I missed tremendously.  But I was quickly caught up in the rich material Tom’s stories opened up to me, a whole world of post-secularization experiences that both fascinated me and broke my heart with grief for what our ancestors had experienced.  I moved from the tapes to the other papers contained in my mother’s boxes, including a handful of notes from J.P. Harrington’s collection featuring Isabel Meadows.  As I’ve done all my life, I began to write out my responses in order to understand what I read.  Poems, stories, and essays began to form, as did artistic responses to documents like blood quantum charts, BIA enrollment forms, and material related to mission lands.   At last, I realized that this was a huge project, nearly overwhelming, and would require serious dedication of time, resources and energy.

            I took the first step by applying for, and receiving, a grant from the American Philosophical Society to have my grandfather’s tapes transferred to CDs.  A series of these stories were published in News from Native California under the title, “The Light from Carissa Plains.”  Next, I proposed a sabbatical project under the same name and received a year-long fellowship from UCLA to work on the book there.  I had been born at UCLA Hospital, so returning to that campus to work on a book about my family seemed like the Universe was giving me its blessing for the project.  With my older half-sister Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, Chair of the Esselen Nation, close by, archives all around, and the homelands of my ancestors stretching out in every direction, my time in California was intense –  painful, exhausting, and exhilarating, often simultaneously. 

            After ten months of non-stop research and writing, I had the bones of the book.  I continued writing and revising for another four years while teaching full-time, receiving several Lenfest Summer Grants from my institution, Washington and Lee University, to support travel to the Smithsonian in D.C., and back to California.  At one point, my colleague Chris Gavaler read over my manuscript and encouraged me to change the title from The Light from Carissa Plains to the much more descriptive Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, taking the title from one of the poems.

            Early on, I knew I wanted Heyday to publish this book.  In addition to Heyday’s dedication to California Indian publications, I’d long admired their book Only What We Could Carry, a collection of documents, poetry, prose and artwork about the Japanese Internment Camps.  I knew that Heyday would be able to handle the kind of multi-genre manuscript that I had in mind for Bad Indians.  But when I sent the early manuscript to publisher Malcolm Margolin, he felt it was still too unpolished, more successful as a handful of vignettes than as a cohesive book. 

         

             Disappointed but not crushed, I spent several more years writing and fine-tuning the book so that its form and content reflected the vision I had in my head.  During this time, my father also passed away from complications of diabetes; he had never fully understood my need to tell the harsher stories of our family and tribal history, and now he would never see the finished piece, never experience the healing I hoped the book would encourage.  I felt that the California Indian community needed this book now more than ever, and submitted the manuscript to a university publisher whose editor had expressed interest.  Unfortunately, the press's marketing director found the project to be unmarketable.  I sent the manuscript off to another publisher who expressed strong interest, but they kept the manuscript for an extended period of time without giving me a solid response.  This lengthy period of multiple submissions is the norm for trying to get a book published, but in frustration, I told that publisher I was sending the manuscript elsewhere, and sent my precious package off to Malcolm Margolin again. 

            That good man sat down and read it immediately, and wrote me a heartfelt note that led to a signed contract not too much later.  I’d known all along he would understand the depth and breadth of this book if I could just get it right, and I’m grateful that he was willing to re-read it after enduring that earlier, very rough draft.

            I wish my mother could be here to see the completion of this project.  She has been at my side all these ten years of writing, reading, researching, dreaming, and revising.  I wish my father could hold this book in his hands and see why healing requires us to expose and relive some of the most painful personal and ancestral experiences; perhaps he would have seen how those genealogies of violence in our blood are tied to survival and renewal.  Perhaps he would have forgiven those who hurt him, and whose hurt he passed on to his children.  Perhaps he would have begun to forgive himself. 

            I like to think that both of my parents would both be more than pleased to see how our collaborative work has become a memorial and testimony for the Ancestors, and a contribution to the renaissance of California Indian culture.  I like to imagine my parents would see how, despite my removal from Indian family and homelands at the age of three due to difficulties in their own lives, they each managed to help me find a kind of wholeness at last.

Kids on Ponies

Deby Miranda, Los Angeles, CA

There used to be this guy ... he'd come through the neighborhoods with a pony and a set of child-sized, mythologically-correct cowboy gear: the hat, vest, chaps, sometimes a bandana.  And he'd smooth-talk the parents while the pony charmed their kids: a picture, just a few dollars, every kid's dream.  Remember that guy?  More importantly, remember that pony?

It's the iconic American Childhood photograph: a kid, somewhere between three and twelve years old, seated on a generic pony.  Sometimes frightened and cowering, sometimes living the fantasy with a yell or a waving hat, the children vary by age and ethnicity, but the theme is always the same: Wild West!  Cowboys!  (Injuns!)

I have two of these photographs.  In one, I am sitting with a broad grin, but fairly sedate.  That's the cover of Bad Indians.  In the other, much faded, I have my left hand raised in a proud "V," giving the peace sign.  This second picture makes me think that my father was the adult who put me up on that pony; he loved encouraging the Brown Power Fist or the Peace Sign.  Or, perhaps he was already gone by then, and I was signaling to his absent spirit, far away in San Quentin.  Either way, that second picture has my dad's flare for the radical flashing across my face.

Because the Peace Sign photo was too faded to work well on a book cover, I used the sedate version for Bad Indians.  But you know which one is my favorite.

 Do you have a Kid on Pony picture of yourself?  Send it to me at deborah.a.miranda@gmail.com and I'll put it up here.  

Two of my sisters have already started off the collection with their contributions!

Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, Seaside CA

Patricia Miranda Maldonado, Seaside CA

Send me YOUR kid on a pony moment!

deborah.a.miranda@gmail.com

Tiara Ramirez, San Jose CA

Terry, Grand Rapids, MI

Susan, Columbus OH

Mickey, Seattle WA

Johnny and Jenny, Butte Montana

Timmy, Los Angeles CA

Katrina, Albuquerque NM

Joshua, Chicago IL

Margaret, Portland OR

Rosa, Tijuana Mexico

Chris, Kansas City MO

Ku'ualoha Ho'omanawanui says,

 So this is "riding a pony Hawaiian style." That's me on the right, one of our old time paniolo cowboys Keoki Ka'eo, a rodeo legend back in the 1950s on the left, my sister and our friend Tina in front. Keoki's horse's name in Manyana. The horse I'm on is Peso Bar. This is about 1972.

Rosie (Age 5) and German Gonzalez (Age 2), Photo: Recuerdo Del Parque Agua Azul, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, August 21, 1970.

 

Mira L.  Love the photo of a photo that's happening here!

Here is mine. Was going to use it as my back cover photo on my next novel (my first novel Yellowbird won the NWCA first-book award. my second novel--Dragonfly, Walking Stick just out). Cheers, Judy Smith

  "As you can see from attached photo, I also rode the range at a young age—perhaps 20 years before you did—watched over by my own Jewish mother.  Having so much in common with you, I look forward to attending your 17 Jan reading at California Historical Society, especially to hear about aspects of your life that differ from mine." - Harvey Hacker

Jacqueline Marx on the middle pony in Morristown, Tennessee - now Cantor at Temple Emanu-El in New Jersey.  She's a secret writer, folks; just wait till her book comes out!  If it's anything like what I've seen so far, it should knock your socks off.

UCLA Interview About "Bad Indians"

In 2007-2008, I was a Fellow at the UCLA Institute of American Cultures, with the Native American Studies Program. In November 2007, the Institute of American Cultures (IAC) hosted a Fall Forum and Welcome Reception in honor of the 2007-2008 Visiting Scholars, Postdoctoral, Predoctoral, & Graduate Fellows, and Research Grant Awardees.

Tritia Toyota, Ph.D., award-winning broadcast journalist & adjunct professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies, interviewed 2007-2008 IAC Visiting Scholars, Ellie Hernández, myself, and Amy Sueyoshi, about our research projects. (Dr. Winton was unable to attend the IAC Fall Forum as she was researching and teaching in Ghana)

At that point, my project was called "The Light from Carissa Plains: Reinventing California Indian Identity." It has since come to be titled "Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir." This interview gives you a good idea of the project's scope, even then, when I was still figuring it all out.

Please note: At the interview, I was so nervous that I said J.P. Harrington's consultant was named "Isabel Ramirez," confusing Isabel Meadows and Laura Ramirez. Ooops!

To view: lick on the photo below [you'll need RealPlayer]; the link takes you to the IAC website.  Once there, scroll down to the second interview. Click "view Deborah Miranda interview."  Enjoy! [I'm aware that the link hasn't been working, but IAC sent me a new link that fixes the problem.]

 

UCLA Interview about Bad Indians