Trash

-->

When I was a kid growing up in a trailer park in rural Western Washington State, some of the best days were when my step-dad made a dump run.  Cedar View Trailer Park didn’t provide garbage pick-up, so we took our trash to the dump every week or so.  This dump was old-school: no limits, no guidelines, just back your pick-up truck to the edge - or in my step-dad Tom's case, his light yellow Eldorado pick-up - and heave-ho. (Yes, I know it seems odd that we'd have a Cadillac Eldorado yet live in a trailer; my step-father had a series of interesting cars acquired through poker games, barter, debts collected; like the amphibious car we took to Westport so he could drive it into the water and watch onlookers gasp as he flipped switches and turned it into a functional boat.  The effect was ruined, however, when the amphibious car stalled out and the Coast Guard had to tow my step-dad and his pals back into port.  We also had a huge brown boat that we dubbed "the Ark" sitting in our yard for a few years that we joked would come in handy if the rain failed to stop come July.)

The way my step-dad *imagined* his Westport debut with the "Amphicar."

What I liked about dump runs with my step-dad was that Tommy was a born scrounger, one of those guys who could make something out of anything, or sell it to someone who could.  When I got older, I wondered if Tom, from Minnesota, was Anishinabe or Lakota.  But my sister Annette DeLeonard told me once that she’d heard Tom was a Traveler, a gypsy.  He was very dark, as dark as my real dad, with similar dimples and wavy black hair, dark brown eyes - handsome in a slick way, and charming.  He never seemed to have an actual profession; he drove semi-trucks, towed and repaired trailers, traded, bought and sold just about anything, and always seemed to have a dozen "jobs" on the line at once.  He was the kind of guy who drove vehicles he’d bartered for down our little county roads with grace and style, a cigarette in one hand and a Coke can full of beer in the other.  

Me and Tom: fishing trip.  He'd gotten this little tear-drop trailer in trade somewhere.

Once he had a job towing trailers across the border from Washington State into Canada; he took my brother Kacey and me with him a few times (I had my first taste of deep-fried prawns at a little café along the way and decided this was absolute gourmet food) until our mom figured out that Tom wasn’t so much transporting trailers as smuggling something IN those trailers, and Kacey and I were along as innocent distractions for the border patrol.  I guess nowadays, you'd call my step-dad a con artist. 

Rare photo of Tom, circa 1970?

Anyways, I loved Tommy.  He was invariably sweet and kind to me, telling me I was “smarter than the average bear” and bringing home candy or pocket change for me.  He wasn’t exactly attentive, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body, and he was generous to a fault.  On dump runs, while he checked out potential scrounge-worthy trash, he'd let me rummage through the toys that had been thrown away to see if anything appealed to me.  I know, right? Letting your 6 or 7 year old paw through a garbage dump?!  A kid's dream.  I always found something - a naked doll, a teddy bear, a chalkboard, a book or encyclopedia, some used watercolor paints in a cool box. 

One day I found a doll about a foot tall, completely made of purple velvet fabric, with a real horsetail for hair.  I learned how to braid hair on that doll, but that's another story with an ending I don’t want to tell.

I'm thinking fondly of those dump runs with Tom because today is Father's Day, and as I gave a friend a ride back to her apartment, we passed a dumpster outside a large apartment complex.  There, abandoned on the asphalt, was a beautiful wooden dresser, and we could see all the drawers for it just flung into the trash.  Well, I had to look, didn't I?  Luckily my friend was just as curious and gorgeously uninhibited.  So we parked, got out, and looked into the dumpster.  UNBELIEVABLE! we said to each other: there's an entire apartment in there! 

We started with the brand new soccerball, for my friend's grandson.  Then we began seeing the really good stuff:  a whole bag of kitchen cooking utensils, top-quality, even some fancy knives still in their sheathes.  Baking dishes and pots and pans, glasses miraculously unbroken.  Unopened household cleaners.  A brand-new umbrella.  An ironing board.  A hand-pieced quilt, for heaven’s sake!  “I’ll bet he broke his grandma’s heart when he threw THAT out,” my friend said.  We figured it was a student, tossing out his apartment before leaving town; or, a property manager stuck with emptying a student’s apartment.  Either way, this stuff was primo scrounge.  We couldn’t believe no one had taken this to Habitat for Humanity, or called the Good Will, or even – as good manners around these parts dictate – just set it all outside the dumpster for easy pickings.  I mean, computer speakers?  Come ON!

“You know what the best part is?”  my friend asked me rhetorically as I balanced one of the dresser drawers on end so she could step up and lean over into the bottom of the dumpster.  “The best part is, you think this is fun too.  Thank you so much!  My daughter can use ALL of this stuff!”

It crossed my mind then that perhaps a newly-minted Full Professor shouldn’t be dumpster diving, at least not in her own university town.  It crossed my mind that you can take the girl out of the trailer park, but you can’t take the trailer park out of the girl.  And it crossed my mind that for five years, while my real father was in San Quentin far away, I had a daddy who taught me a thing or two about surviving at the bottom of the economic graph.  And not just surviving, but rising to levels of resourcefulness, creativity, and artistry that allowed me to become the woman I am now.  Yes, I am a professor of English.  And yes, I still love a good dumpster dive now and then: something there is about perfectly good household materials tossed out as trash that drives me absolutely fucking nuts. 

No, I am no longer that needy kid whose family lived by the “skin of our teeth,” as my mom used to say, but I know so many people who do – my friend, her daughter, her grandchildren, all trying to live on incomes that qualify them for food stamps, TANF, WIC and the food pantry.  No, I have no shame about dipping into that dumpster for that family, for the children who will be so delighted with that ball, for the mother who will wash those blankets and treasure that hand-made quilt and be grateful for a lamp in the bedroom.

And yes, though he was only in my life for five years, and things didn’t end well between Tom and my mother, and even though he died of a terrible cancer soon afterwards, that travelin’ man left his mark on me.  Thanks, Tommy.  Thanks for the practical application of survival skills you taught me.  I'll never know if you were Indian or Gypsy or any other ethnic combination.  But I do know that you were a kind man who saw opportunity everywhere.  I like to think some of that determination rubbed off on me, just a little bit.  One man's trash, you used to say, with a grin.  One man's trash.

Writing Bad Indians: A Short History of a Long Project

-->

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.

77th Birthday

By the time I knew my mother, her Hollywood days had come and gone.  The spiked heels, glamorous dresses, flamenco dancing past had left behind just an affinity for dark crimson lipstick, drawn-on eyebrows, and sometimes, when she felt good, bright red nail polish.  Most days she wore stretch pants and sweatshirts, a pair of cheap sandals or Keds.  She liked black coffee, not too hot, and Pall Mall cigarettes.  Real butter when she could get it, margarine if not, and pasta, and meat.  I remember standing beside her as she made dinner – she’d snack on bites of raw hamburger, laugh at my revulsion.  Vegetables were not her friends.  She liked orange sherbet in a mug with milk poured over it for dessert.  Her culinary specialties included homemade egg noodles, tacos, flour tortillas, meatloaf, apple and blackberry pies (best pie crust ever), lemon meringue pie, enchiladas, refried beans from scratch, French toast.  Comfort foods.

On her birthday, if we were flush, we always went out to the one Chinese restaurant in town; growing up in Los Angeles, she’d grown fond of Cashew Chicken, deep-fried shrimp and other Americanized dishes.  My mother read constantly, fat books of fiction or obscure self-help treatises that temporarily made dark reality bearable.  She was smart – probably, brilliant.  She could have earned a Ph.D. in how to feed a family on a food stamp budget. She put herself through two years of community college, earned an Associate’s degree in library science, and interviewed at a local TV station for the position of videotape librarian.  They hired her in large part, her Black co-worker later whispered, because of her Hispanic last name – it boosted the station’s number of Affirmative Action employees up a notch.  Miranda was my father’s name, which she’d gone back to after divorcing my step-father.  Sometimes, fate works like that.  She was single, poor, raising an Indian kid, she had survived my father once, and still had another round coming.  I’d say, she earned the name Miranda and the one perk it ever gave her.  

Madgel Eleanor Miranda, April 16, 1935 - November 21st, 2001

She worked like a dog at that TV station, long hours, low pay, little recognition. But the job gave her a blessed slice of freedom, independence.  She loved to travel; mid-life, she paid her own way to places like Israel, Denmark, and all over the U.S. for genealogical research trips.  She was brave.  In her short lifetime, my mother had been many different women.  Some of the lives she lived, I wouldn’t have recognized her.  She was one mother to my older sister and brother in the 1950s, a completely different one with me in the 1960s.  She didn’t use endearments with anyone.  Never said “honey” or “sweetheart” with any of us at all, let alone with the promiscuity that I used (and still use) with my own children.  My name was her only endearment for me: Deby,when all was well, Deborah Ann when I pushed her limits.  My mother’s heart was a secret compartment which took in everything she experienced; very little ever came back out.  She didn’t write things down, she didn’t go to a therapist, she didn’t have a close friend more than once or twice in her lifetime.  She swore rarely, and only when profoundly provoked or completely surprised.  She was a closed book, a story whose pages she burned as soon as each one had been written.  She loved, however, and fiercely; usually men who hurt her, or who were unavailable, or both. 

I realize only now how angry my mother was all her life – at herself, for her sins (real or imagined) or at losses she could not let go.  Pregnancy at seventeen.  “We didn’t have her long enough,” my grandmother once sighed, remembering that shot-gun wedding.  Three babies before she was twenty-one.  The death of a child through her own neglect and addiction.  A thirsty woman in many ways, my mother drank for much of her life, never really stopped until she found the deep well of Judaism and converted in her forties, learning Hebrew, learning ritual.  She was courageous under fire, and determined.  She died an observant Jew, but her Conservative rabbi wouldn’t hold a memorial service for her because she had told me that she wanted to be cremated, and I refused to disobey her last wish.  Six months later, when I finally located her will, I discovered that in this document, she had actually directed that she be buried in a plain pine box, like a good Jew.  Why, in her last weeks, had she said “yes,” when I asked if she wanted cremation?  I’ll never know.  Secrets.  Secrets. 

That was my mother – always the smell of cigarettes, a smoke screen, a thunderous silence wrapped around her like a cloak.  A kind woman who took in strays, paid for veterinary care she couldn’t afford, stuck up for the underdog, faithfully paid her union dues – The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers – and marched in the WTO protests through downtown Seattle, not knowing her body harbored squamous cell lung cancer, not knowing she didn’t have long, but living every moment as if she did.

Maybe if she’d lived longer – like her own mother, a week away from 95 when she passed – my mother would have eventually come out of her shell.  Maybe we would have been able to talk with words instead of the inarticulate language of love mired in deep confusion.  Maybe she would have told me her reasons for some of the inexplicable things she’d done in her life – done to herself, to her children, her parents, herself. 

But my mother, she didn’t live to see anything like 95.  She didn’t live to see anything like clarity or closure.  Like the rest of her life, her death was hasty, hurried, a rush job that was over almost before we had time to realize it had begun.  Sick in late August, diagnosed in September, treated in October, dead by mid-November.  Eleven years later, I’m still trying to figure out how to say goodbye, all the different ways to tell my mother “I love you” even as she moves farther and farther away on a journey in which I, and our time together, was only one brief moment.

Mock-up of the book cover; coming out in January 2013.  HeyDay.