While in San Jose in January, I was Rose Amador's guest on Native Voice TV. What a wonderful chance to talk about the book and California Mission Project issues!
(link has been repaired; please let me know if it breaks again)
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Monday, February 4, 2013
BlogHer.com Features 'Bad NDNs'
Grace Hwang Lynch features this blog's 4th Grade Mission Project posts in her column.
Excerpt:
Grace is the News and Politics Editor at BlogHer; you can also find her writing about raising an Asian mixed-race family at HapaMama. The BlogHer Publishing Network, with more than 3,000 blogs, is one of the largest and highest-quality publishing networks of blogs authored by women.
Excerpt:
It's the time of year when fourth graders (and their parents) in California are breaking out the glue guns and sugar cubes, in the name of learning about history. For those of you who aren't familiar with this rite of passage, the state curriculum has for years included a chapter in which school kids make a model of one of the historic missions built by the Catholic church.
Image Credit: Grace Hwang Lynch
Grace is the News and Politics Editor at BlogHer; you can also find her writing about raising an Asian mixed-race family at HapaMama. The BlogHer Publishing Network, with more than 3,000 blogs, is one of the largest and highest-quality publishing networks of blogs authored by women.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Q & A with Deborah Miranda
Heyday's lovely intern Elizabeth crafted these questions for me, and I have answered them as best I can. If you have a question for me about Bad Indians, please send them to me at badndns@gmail.com, and we'll do another round of Q & A!
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ANOTHER INTERVIEW:
Donna Miscolta's interview with me may be found on her blog here. Thanks to Donna for some truly great questions that elicited answers I didn't even know I knew!
-->
Bad Indians is a blend of academic writing,
genealogical research, memoir, magical realism, literature, and poetry, sort of
a literary mixed-media piece. Why did you choose this format? Were there things
you could express in certain forms of writing that you couldn’t in others?
Actually,
I didn’t choose that format; the book did, the stories did. In fact when I realized that I had this weird
mix of poetry/prose/fiction/research going on, I panicked. Who would publish it? Who would read it? Would it make sense? But I went with it anyhow, since the writing
was flowing out in these different ways and stopped if I tried to force it into
just academic writing or just a poetry manuscript. Each piece started with research, information
coming into me from a source, but sometimes I could only respond in poetry,
other times, only prose made sense, and still other times, only something
visual, like the Blood Quantum Charts or the JP Harrington collage. Eventually, I remembered Gloria Anzaldua
talking about how a mosaic is what you make out of broken pieces, and suddenly,
it made sense: I couldn’t “reconstruct” our culture, but I could gather what pieces I could find and try to create something
new out of it. Once I saw that mosaic
format was, in fact, part of the message, everything made sense.
You make the case that the
trauma of Missionization is passed down through generations, and that
California Indian communities today are still suffering from this trauma. Could
you talk more about this idea and how you address it in your work?
Quite
a lot of work has been done with the idea of historical trauma as it relates to
the lives of children of the Jewish Holocaust survivors; the idea that trauma
continues to effect subsequent generations in various forms came to me from
that line of research, and when I looked to see if anyone addressed this for
Native peoples, I was fortunate to find work by Bonnie and Eduardo Duran (Native American Post-Colonial Psychology)
as well as materials by Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart that specifically looked
at this syndrome in Native communities, and offered not just examples and
analysis, but treatment. I recognized
immediately that if the original generation of missionized Indians had been
traumatized and never been allowed to heal, of course that pain and
dysfunctional coping mechanisms would affect their children; and that
subsequent trauma in each generation (secularization, slavery, homelessness,
boarding school) also compounded those unhealed wounds with still more trauma –
all without ever a moment to draw a breath, regroup, heal. By the time five or six or seven generations
have gone by – for those lucky enough to have an unbroken genealogy – so much trauma has built up and typically been
left unaddressed that it seems almost overwhelming to even imagine. I try to confront this most obviously in the
piece “The Genealogy of Violence I” and “The Genealogy of Violence II;” in the
latter, I interspersed a story about my father beating my little brother with
documentation from mission priests about Indians slowly learning to
‘discipline’ (abuse) their own children from priests and soldiers. To see those lessons in abuse written out so
clearly was unnerving for me; it took a long time to figure out how to
illustrate such an evil and heartbreaking concept.
The poems in the book fit in organically with the themes you discuss and often
deliver a devastating emotional punch. Were any of the poems written
specifically for Bad Indians, or were they all part of your previous
work?
The poems in the book fit in organically with the themes you discuss and often
deliver a devastating emotional punch. Were any of the poems written
specifically for Bad Indians, or were they all part of your previous
work?
Only
two of the poems existed as drafts before I conceived of the book (“Ishi at
Large” and “In the Basement of the Bone Museum”). The rest were all written specifically for Bad Indians and came out of the research
into my family, California missions, and secularization.
You touch on the fourth grade “Mission Project” required of
all California students at several points throughout the book, even introducing
an early section as “a very late fourth grade project.” What do you think the
effect of this perennial assignment has been on the public perception of
California Indians (and on the Indians’ image of themselves), and is it too
late to fix it?
First of all, it is never too
late to give students and the general public a new perspective; look at all the
huge changes we’ve seen in the dominant culture’s perceptions of African
Americans or the LGBTQ2 community in the past 100 years. It may be slow, but it can happen, and it can
make a difference in the lives of both dominant and ‘minority’ cultures. Secondly, I think the effect of the typical
Mission Project has been to not just implant racial stereotypes about Native
Californians in children’s minds, but also to assert that those racial
stereotypes are, in fact, okay – sanctioned by all of the authorities in a
child’s life, from parents right on up the chain of school administration and
into government. The result of that, of
course, is a general public who does not question laws that discriminate
against Native people, and which doesn’t even know how to have an civil
conversation about historic wrongs, responsibility for justice, or compassion
for communities suffering from historic trauma.
The problem with the typical Mission Project is that it ignores the
complexity of colonization and Missionization in favor of a myth that allows
people to pretend historical events do not affect our contemporary lives. It’s like raising kids without ever teaching
them that actions have consequences, and never allowing them to problem solve
ways to deal with, or even prevent, future mistakes.
On your blog, you say that “In
some ways, it feels as if I have been writing this book all my life.” How long did
it take you to write Bad Indians? When and how did all the myriad parts
of the narrative begin to gel into a cohesive book?
For
the academic year 2007-2008, I had the gift of a sabbatical – ten months free
from teaching and advising. The idea for
a book which was a kind of “tribal memoir” (not just my memories alone, but the
memories of an entire community) had come to me a few years earlier when I’d
re-discovered my grandfather Tom Miranda’s cassette tapes. I’d written up a sabbatical proposal, but
really, I had no idea what I was getting into.
The combination of returning to California for a research fellowship at
UCLA, where I was actually born, and having all that solitude in which to
research and read and write, allowed the narrative come out of my unconscious. It was during those ten months that I wrote
most of the book, and when I could finally see and accept its multi-genre
form. I had a rough rough draft of the
book when I came back to Virginia after that year; it took another four or five
years for the pieces to completely come together, for some other pieces to be
written, and for me to say, “yeah, this is right, this is done.” So all told – maybe ten years.
Did you discover anything new
about your family while researching the book, or come to any realizations or
revelations while writing?
Yes. It isn’t easy to articulate what I’ve
learned, but I can try: I learned that
each generation has the responsibility to accept our wounds and work to heal
them. I learned that survival sometimes
requires us to be ‘bad’ or make ‘bad’ decisions, but we are still blood, still
family, still a part of the ongoing story.
I learned that historical trauma may be at the heart of family
dysfunction, but it is still not an excuse for it. I learned a lot about my relationship with my
father, and about myself; I found a way to love him without making up fantasies
about what a great dad he was, or, bashing him for all of his flaws. If I had
to sum up this experience in one word, writing this book taught me how essential
it is to have compassion for ourselves.
How did you come to choose the title Bad Indians?
For a long time, the working
title was “The Light From Carissa Plains,” after one of my grandfather Tom’s
stories. But once I found the newspaper
article “Bad Indian Goes on Rampage at Santa Ynez,” and wrote the poem “Novena
for Bad Indians,” I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head. I also found the phrase used innumerable
times by priests, soldiers, government officials, teachers, virtually every
kind of authority there was; and of course, I realized that to be a ‘bad
Indian’ was to be resistant to colonization when no other avenue of resistance
worked. Then there was the thing my
father said to me years ago – “They say the only good Indian is a bad Indian,
but hell, even when we’re dead we aren’t good enough!” Finally I said to my colleague, the writer
Chris Gavaler, “I wish I could just call this book Bad Indians,” and he looked at me like I was crazy. “Why can’t you?” he asked – I think I still
feared the connotations of that phrase.
I’d closed myself off from seeing it as a viable title. It was almost like a curse, or a slur,
something to be ashamed of – not shout from the cover of a book! What a relief to embrace it!
Throughout Bad Indians,
you emphasize the power of words and language. Why is it that our stories are
so powerful? How are Native American writers using their words and stories to
overturn the traditional narrative?
Words – written and spoken – are tools of a craft; just as artists use
color, form, shape, texture, all the mediums and resources at their command, so
storytellers utilize language. Like any
tool, writing can be used to imprison a person, or used to enlighten a
person. I think that Native peoples may
have resisted the tools of literacy for a long time, because it was used as a
kind of brainwashing technique to beat our own languages and cultures out of
us. But the truth is, traditional Native
people were master craftspeople of language, rhetoric, storytelling, oratory, the
creation of worlds. My sister Louise
Miranda Ramirez is slowly reviving the Esselen language, and one of the things
she’s taught me is that to know the right word is to have access to the power
of that word. When you can shape a story,
you take on the responsibility of what that story does in the world – does it
help people? does it heal? does it teach? or does it misinform, lie, enable theft,
enact violence? I think Native writers
use literature not just to overturn or expose the traditional narratives of
exploitation and miseducation, but in fact, bring us closer to understanding
our responsibility to make certain words are used carefully, intentionally,
creatively rather than destructively.
Who or what are your inspirations
when it comes to writing?
So
many Native writers – Leslie Silko, Linda Hogan, Greg Sarris, Susan Power, Joy
Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Nora Dauenhauer, Simon
Ortiz, Ernestine Hayes – have done the hard work of opening doors for other
Native writers. Then there are Native
scholars whose research gives me heart, our allies in academia, community
activists whose work is so uplifting, my family, my children, and of course,
the Ancestors. I often think about the
fact that pre-Contact California had as many as one million indigenous
inhabitants, and yet, by the time my grandfather Tom was born in 1903, we were
down to less than 10,000. So many family
lineages in the mission records just come to a complete halt; so many Indians
died and left no survivors. Several
times in our family tree, I can see exactly where that end would have come, but
one person survived just long enough to have a child, and that child survived
just long enough to have a child … our family tree is full of fighters! The chances of my being here now are
infinitesimal. The chances of me being
able to write, being encouraged to write, and getting published, slimmer
still. So I feel a great inspiration
from and responsibility to the ancestors whose strong spirits got me here, who
have stories that need to be told.
What do you most hope readers
will take away from your work?
I
hope readers take away a sense of the layers of history that we live within
right now. A knowledge of the human
suffering, endurance and ingenuity, sacrifices and small triumphs, that make up
California and North America – Indian Country.
Insight into the limitations of traditional education, the biases in
historical records and publications. I’d
like readers to question authority, be inspired to learn more on their own, put
this knowledge to use in daily interactions with others. Is that too much? Then I hope that readers simply take away an
appreciation of just what price was paid for the land they live on today, who
paid (and still pays) that price; I hope they take home a new respect for the indigenous
people living that struggle.
ANOTHER INTERVIEW:
Donna Miscolta's interview with me may be found on her blog here. Thanks to Donna for some truly great questions that elicited answers I didn't even know I knew!
Monday, January 7, 2013
Seen at Pt. Reyes bookstore
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.
Monday, December 31, 2012
No Charms Against Lightning and "Rabbit Stories"
There Are No Charms Against Lightning
or to keep earthquakes at bay, bring fish to your net,
make women fall at your feet or raise children from the dead.
There's only longing and fear and desire and grief in this world.
Get that through your head. No magic, no shortcuts.
Don't expect so much from St. John's Wort. It's just a flower.
Famous only to bees and a few migrant insects.
Likewise, peyote. Give that one lots of space and forget
that shaman shit you read. They lied. You know this,
but you prefer to pretend: quartz crystals capable
of healing cancer, mystical runes visible by the light
of a full moon spelling out the way home. Look, there's
no sacred star, no amulet to clutch when the monsters come.
Instead we have existential angst, the question why, serial killers
and bad TV shows about terrorists who are us. There are
no charms against lightning, I tell you. Wrong world.
Try the next one over. Take your hope and faith and
magical thinking and hit the road. Leave us our lightning rods,
our Prozac, our robotic remote controls -
that which we make, that which we control,
that which shall surely save us.
Deborah A. Miranda, 12/2012
Quickie Book Review:
This week I had the great good fortune to read Tslagi poet and artist Kim Shuck's new prose manuscript, Rabbit Stories. Here is the blurb I wrote for Kim, after I could finally put words together that didn't sound like crap after her beautiful weavings:
Subatomic particles. String. Knots. The water in London, San Francisco, Tar Creek. A coy Spider. The Dance of DNA. Chestnut Man's kiss. Songs made of strawberry soda. These are glimpses of the complex world in which a Tslagi girl/woman lives. Named "Rabbit Food," after a wild rose, the girl is accompanied through life by irreverent guardian and teacher Rabbit, "a creature of trick and pleasure." Kim Shuck's collection is tenderly constructed, finely woven in and out of Rabbit Food's lifetime as girl, young woman, new mother, and middle-aged artist. Rabbit Stories winds through waters layered with dream and memory, loops back around time with a wise/cracking humor. I couldn't put these stories down. They're singing in me now; it feels as if the DNA in my cells has been transformed by, as Rabbit would say, "a joy in craft and artifact." Brava!
Seriously: I sat in my chair after finishing Rabbit Stories, and honestly felt as if my cellular DNA construction had been rearranged. My body felt transformed. Even now, I don't feel like I can describe that sensation of reading (was it reading, or breathing in?) material that went so deeply into my psyche and changed - or rather, improved - who I am.
All of this doesn't begin to tell you what it is in Shuck's book that did this to me, or for me. There were no magic amulets, no Cherokee charms, no ancient grannies teaching secrets. The story is quite literally woven out of time - clearly, a young girl growing into womanhood, becoming a lover, becoming a mother, becoming an artist - but with a chronological orientation toward connections rather than linearity. In other words, we do not meet Rabbit Food, the main character, as a baby and then watch her grow into maturity. Rather, we come to know her through the human and planetary connections she feels, clusters of memories from various important moments in her life as a whole.
And none of this is narrated by Rabbit Food herself, but has an alternative point of view from her guardian and teacher that teaches us as much as Rabbit Food. Perhaps it starts with that name, Rabbit Food; it's the name of a kind of wild rose favored by rabbits, and using the literal translation rather than the more romanticized "Wild Rose" gives this story the deliciously unexpected pleasure of, well, reality. The world doesn't get much more real than intercontinental air travel over the pole to reunite with a lover, driving across the United States in an old car with a father who is somehow distant and lost, bathing a baby in the kitchen sink or a child absorbed by the mysteries of knots and string. Yet in Shuck's hands, this reality is narrated from the point of view of Rabbit. Yes, that Rabbit - Trickster, "a creature of trick and pleasure," - and Rabbit observes Rabbit Food all of her life, a constant loving and instructive presence whose main goal is to introduce and perpetuate "silliness" into Rabbit Food's life.
Now, define "silliness."
Merriam says: Having or showing a lack of common sense or judgment; foolish.
foolish - fatuous - daft - dull - idiotic - fool - goof - ninny
Clearly, dominant culture doesn't think much of silliness. And there you have it: Rabbit's reason for being, the mission behind Rabbit's love for Rabbit Food. Rabbit teaches Rabbit Food to see beyond the reality given to her by the dominant culture. Rabbit turns it upside down for her, and she is able to understand that reality isn't "common sense" goals like money, career, advancement, ambition. In such a world, reality is the death of joy; in Rabbit's world, silliness is the key to wisdom. Thus Rabbit Food's real self, an artist whose work communicates an indigenous survivance in contemporary times, is in fact "fed" by Rabbit.
At certain points, in fact, it seems that Rabbit Food's capacity for "silliness" even surpasses Rabbit's; some of her creations are more complex than even Rabbit can bear for long, but Rabbit Food knows they are necessary. Throughout the story, Rabbit flirts with Spider, a female presence who has an important but less obvious role in Rabbit Food's education; sometimes I get the distinct feeling that Spiderwoman is who Rabbit Food is growing up to be, with her love of string and beads and knots and weaving.
At any rate, my stumbling words can't do this book justice. I don't have the ability to look at the world through Rabbit's sacred eyes. But Kim Shuck does it beautifully, and I can't wait until Rabbit Stories is out in the world for all to read. Watch for it at http://www.poeticmatrix.com/ in January 2013.
or to keep earthquakes at bay, bring fish to your net,
make women fall at your feet or raise children from the dead.
There's only longing and fear and desire and grief in this world.
Get that through your head. No magic, no shortcuts.
Don't expect so much from St. John's Wort. It's just a flower.
Famous only to bees and a few migrant insects.
Likewise, peyote. Give that one lots of space and forget
that shaman shit you read. They lied. You know this,
but you prefer to pretend: quartz crystals capable
of healing cancer, mystical runes visible by the light
of a full moon spelling out the way home. Look, there's
no sacred star, no amulet to clutch when the monsters come.
Instead we have existential angst, the question why, serial killers
and bad TV shows about terrorists who are us. There are
no charms against lightning, I tell you. Wrong world.
Try the next one over. Take your hope and faith and
magical thinking and hit the road. Leave us our lightning rods,
our Prozac, our robotic remote controls -
that which we make, that which we control,
that which shall surely save us.
Deborah A. Miranda, 12/2012
Quickie Book Review:
This week I had the great good fortune to read Tslagi poet and artist Kim Shuck's new prose manuscript, Rabbit Stories. Here is the blurb I wrote for Kim, after I could finally put words together that didn't sound like crap after her beautiful weavings:
Subatomic particles. String. Knots. The water in London, San Francisco, Tar Creek. A coy Spider. The Dance of DNA. Chestnut Man's kiss. Songs made of strawberry soda. These are glimpses of the complex world in which a Tslagi girl/woman lives. Named "Rabbit Food," after a wild rose, the girl is accompanied through life by irreverent guardian and teacher Rabbit, "a creature of trick and pleasure." Kim Shuck's collection is tenderly constructed, finely woven in and out of Rabbit Food's lifetime as girl, young woman, new mother, and middle-aged artist. Rabbit Stories winds through waters layered with dream and memory, loops back around time with a wise/cracking humor. I couldn't put these stories down. They're singing in me now; it feels as if the DNA in my cells has been transformed by, as Rabbit would say, "a joy in craft and artifact." Brava!
Seriously: I sat in my chair after finishing Rabbit Stories, and honestly felt as if my cellular DNA construction had been rearranged. My body felt transformed. Even now, I don't feel like I can describe that sensation of reading (was it reading, or breathing in?) material that went so deeply into my psyche and changed - or rather, improved - who I am.
All of this doesn't begin to tell you what it is in Shuck's book that did this to me, or for me. There were no magic amulets, no Cherokee charms, no ancient grannies teaching secrets. The story is quite literally woven out of time - clearly, a young girl growing into womanhood, becoming a lover, becoming a mother, becoming an artist - but with a chronological orientation toward connections rather than linearity. In other words, we do not meet Rabbit Food, the main character, as a baby and then watch her grow into maturity. Rather, we come to know her through the human and planetary connections she feels, clusters of memories from various important moments in her life as a whole.
And none of this is narrated by Rabbit Food herself, but has an alternative point of view from her guardian and teacher that teaches us as much as Rabbit Food. Perhaps it starts with that name, Rabbit Food; it's the name of a kind of wild rose favored by rabbits, and using the literal translation rather than the more romanticized "Wild Rose" gives this story the deliciously unexpected pleasure of, well, reality. The world doesn't get much more real than intercontinental air travel over the pole to reunite with a lover, driving across the United States in an old car with a father who is somehow distant and lost, bathing a baby in the kitchen sink or a child absorbed by the mysteries of knots and string. Yet in Shuck's hands, this reality is narrated from the point of view of Rabbit. Yes, that Rabbit - Trickster, "a creature of trick and pleasure," - and Rabbit observes Rabbit Food all of her life, a constant loving and instructive presence whose main goal is to introduce and perpetuate "silliness" into Rabbit Food's life.
Now, define "silliness."
Merriam says: Having or showing a lack of common sense or judgment; foolish.
foolish - fatuous - daft - dull - idiotic - fool - goof - ninny
At certain points, in fact, it seems that Rabbit Food's capacity for "silliness" even surpasses Rabbit's; some of her creations are more complex than even Rabbit can bear for long, but Rabbit Food knows they are necessary. Throughout the story, Rabbit flirts with Spider, a female presence who has an important but less obvious role in Rabbit Food's education; sometimes I get the distinct feeling that Spiderwoman is who Rabbit Food is growing up to be, with her love of string and beads and knots and weaving.
At any rate, my stumbling words can't do this book justice. I don't have the ability to look at the world through Rabbit's sacred eyes. But Kim Shuck does it beautifully, and I can't wait until Rabbit Stories is out in the world for all to read. Watch for it at http://www.poeticmatrix.com/ in January 2013.
Monday, December 3, 2012
"Towards Your Daughter's Education": a note from Harry Downie
As I have mentioned here before, Madgel Miranda, my mother, was a dogged, determined self-taught genealogist. In the pre-internet era, she typed up a form letter explaining her quest to prove my Native blood quantum so that I would be eligible to apply for scholarships targeting Native students. I was 13 years old when Mom started this journey. I remember her sitting at the little kitchen table of our old trailer in Kent, Washington, late at night, with her stack of ditto'd form letters (later Xeroxed), envelopes, stamps, and her battered checkbook. She had lists of people to write to, and in her own methodical way, between cups of coffee or a bowl of noodles with butter and garlic, she'd make her way down those lists. I still have a copy of her form letter. It was very articulate, to the point, but clear: I need you to help me accomplish this for my daughter's education.
She kept all the replies that returned with useful information. Her life may have frequently been a mess, but her genealogical files were tidy. One reply, however, remained hidden from me until recently. In a plastic page protector, my mother stored some transcribed birth records from Carmel Mission about my great-grandmother, Severiana Ramirez Miranda. On one side was that mission record, typed out on Carmel Mission stationary, and on the other, stored back-to-back, a second note about Severiana's twin brother's birth.
What I didn't know until a few weeks ago when I actually removed those pages from the plastic: a third page of stationary was tucked between them. It was a type-written note, briefly explaining that researchers at the mission had found Severiana's entry in the old mission Book of Baptisms, but not that of Tranquilino Miranda, her husband. Fairly usual genealogical correspondence, although once again I was amazed at the graciousness with which researchers responded to so many genealogical requests from amateurs like my mother, people who were training themselves and relied on the kindness of very busy, understaffed, underpaid strangers at great distances.
But what was written in the closing stopped me in my tracks.
"Enclosed you will find your donation, I feel it will be more of use towards your daughter's education. Hoping this will be of use to you, Sincerely..."
Of course my mother had not sent much - maybe five dollars, something to help defray the cost of research, paper, stationary, typewriter ink ribbons. It was something she'd learned early on, something she appreciated: a way of acknowledging the expertise and work load of those she was asking for assistance.
Still, this researcher had returned it, had been moved enough by my mother's form letter to see not just another tedious request, but the woman behind the request, and even further, the young girl - me - whose education was at hand.
I was really touched by this reply. I think, perhaps, my mother was impressed as well, because she kept this piece of stationary so carefully.
But then I read further down to the signature of the researcher. Written in the shakiest of hands, by someone very elderly but very dignified: "Harry Downie, Mission Curator."
I knew that name. In fact, any mission scholar worth her salt knows about Harry Downie. Born in 1903 (a year after my own grandfather, Tom Miranda), Downie was the man who guided the decades-long restoration of Mission Carmel, from 1931 and continuing for over 50 years. He's darn near worshipped in some California mission histories, and damned in others for the romanticized reconstruction of the mission where my ancestors were held and so many died. Harry believed in the greatness of the mission era, and did much of the reconstruction with his own hands; later in life, he supervised and guided, but was still in charge. He passed away in 1980. Although this correspondence with my mother is not dated, I can make an educated guess that their exchange took place sometime between 1975 and 1979, when I went off to college.
What a kick, seeing this note from the famous and infamous Harry Downie to my mother, all these years later. How nice it was of him to return her donation, and tell her that he thought it would be better used "towards your daughter's education" than any mission restoration fund. I'm bemused by this act, shaking my head. I have often argued that money spent on restoring the missions - in some cases, literally rebuilding them from the ground up - would be better spent on support for the descendants of California Indians once exploited in those missions. If all that passion, all that energy, good will, community spirit and investment could have gone into educations for survivors like my father, his parents and grandparents, where would the California Indian community be right now?
That utopian fantasy was not to be. Californians preferred to capture a mythological past in amber, preserve it, revere it. But maybe, at the end of his days, Harry Downie received my mother's note and - for just a moment - had a glimmer of what could have been.
A girl can dream, can't she?
She kept all the replies that returned with useful information. Her life may have frequently been a mess, but her genealogical files were tidy. One reply, however, remained hidden from me until recently. In a plastic page protector, my mother stored some transcribed birth records from Carmel Mission about my great-grandmother, Severiana Ramirez Miranda. On one side was that mission record, typed out on Carmel Mission stationary, and on the other, stored back-to-back, a second note about Severiana's twin brother's birth.
What I didn't know until a few weeks ago when I actually removed those pages from the plastic: a third page of stationary was tucked between them. It was a type-written note, briefly explaining that researchers at the mission had found Severiana's entry in the old mission Book of Baptisms, but not that of Tranquilino Miranda, her husband. Fairly usual genealogical correspondence, although once again I was amazed at the graciousness with which researchers responded to so many genealogical requests from amateurs like my mother, people who were training themselves and relied on the kindness of very busy, understaffed, underpaid strangers at great distances.
But what was written in the closing stopped me in my tracks.
"Enclosed you will find your donation, I feel it will be more of use towards your daughter's education. Hoping this will be of use to you, Sincerely..."
Of course my mother had not sent much - maybe five dollars, something to help defray the cost of research, paper, stationary, typewriter ink ribbons. It was something she'd learned early on, something she appreciated: a way of acknowledging the expertise and work load of those she was asking for assistance.
Still, this researcher had returned it, had been moved enough by my mother's form letter to see not just another tedious request, but the woman behind the request, and even further, the young girl - me - whose education was at hand.
I was really touched by this reply. I think, perhaps, my mother was impressed as well, because she kept this piece of stationary so carefully.
But then I read further down to the signature of the researcher. Written in the shakiest of hands, by someone very elderly but very dignified: "Harry Downie, Mission Curator."
I knew that name. In fact, any mission scholar worth her salt knows about Harry Downie. Born in 1903 (a year after my own grandfather, Tom Miranda), Downie was the man who guided the decades-long restoration of Mission Carmel, from 1931 and continuing for over 50 years. He's darn near worshipped in some California mission histories, and damned in others for the romanticized reconstruction of the mission where my ancestors were held and so many died. Harry believed in the greatness of the mission era, and did much of the reconstruction with his own hands; later in life, he supervised and guided, but was still in charge. He passed away in 1980. Although this correspondence with my mother is not dated, I can make an educated guess that their exchange took place sometime between 1975 and 1979, when I went off to college.
What a kick, seeing this note from the famous and infamous Harry Downie to my mother, all these years later. How nice it was of him to return her donation, and tell her that he thought it would be better used "towards your daughter's education" than any mission restoration fund. I'm bemused by this act, shaking my head. I have often argued that money spent on restoring the missions - in some cases, literally rebuilding them from the ground up - would be better spent on support for the descendants of California Indians once exploited in those missions. If all that passion, all that energy, good will, community spirit and investment could have gone into educations for survivors like my father, his parents and grandparents, where would the California Indian community be right now?
That utopian fantasy was not to be. Californians preferred to capture a mythological past in amber, preserve it, revere it. But maybe, at the end of his days, Harry Downie received my mother's note and - for just a moment - had a glimmer of what could have been.
A girl can dream, can't she?
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Berkeley & Oakland Trip
First stop: California Historical Society.
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| Heyday's annual fundraiser was held at California Historical Society in San Francisco. Here, CHS executive director Anthea Marie Hartig and Heyday Berkeley Roundhouse director Lindsie Bear join forces! photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| The audience prepares for speeches, my reading, and the auction! photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Did I mention the donated catering? YUM. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| L Frank entertaining her fans. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Lillian Fleer, awesome Heyday events co-ordinator. |
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| Our baby. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Jeanine Gendar, my meticulous and generous editor! photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Very sorry to say I've forgotten the names of these two; I'll ask! photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Me and my buds: L Frank, Kim Shuck, Beverly Slapin. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Signing books afterwards; happy as a clam at high tide, as we used to say up around Seattle. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| I was so happy to see Kathleen Smith there - she's the artist whose painting, "August Night," is the cover of my first book of poetry, Indian Cartography. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Lindsie Bear introduced me with her great spirit. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Joanne Campbell, Graton Rancheria Miwok, giving the blessing in her language. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| I had a great time reading from the intro to Bad Indians, and the poem "Teheyapami Achiska." photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| L. Frank (artist, writer, cultural preservationist) and Kimberly Shuck (poet and artist) - lucky me, to have such distinguished friends. photo: D. Miranda |
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| Awesome Heyday staff Diane Lee and Gayle Wattawa - both amazing women who worked on Bad Indians, and who have gorgeous samples of their work laid out! photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| Malcolm Margolin: my publisher. The man behind the dream. photo: Yuliya Goldshteyn |
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| The next day, my friend and host Beverly took me to San Francisco City College for a class taught by Jean Ishibashi ("Ish"). What a view from this campus! |
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| Beverly and me. A special thanks to Beverly for giving me her spare room, feeding me, & driving me everywhere. |
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| Me and Ish - an incredible woman. Her students are blessed. |
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| And the next night, we were at Eastwind Books in Berkeley - and my sister, Louise Miranda Ramirez, surprised me! What a trooper. She read the blessing from the front of the book, a prayer she wrote just for these stories. |
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| Then I talked a bit about the construction of the book... |
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| Told the "Yes, Virginia..." story! |
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| And signed books...(Louise made me the beautiful turtle necklace) |
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| My Eastwind Books gang! L to R: Harvey (husband of bookstore owner Bea), Louise, Ernie Ramirez, me, Keiko, Ellen, Brian, Beverly, and in front, bookstore owner Bea. The best team ever! |
Thursday, October 11, 2012
How the Land was Lost: El Potrero
At the end of June 2012, I traveled back to my homeland in the Carmel area of California. My goal was to discover more about Rancho El Potrero, the piece of land that was awarded to my 5x great-grandfather, Fructuoso de Jesus Cholom Real by Governor Alvarado of Mexico soon after secularization (when Mexico, then occupier of California, closed down the missions).
You can read a little about my previous knowledge of El Potrero here. That was all written before I had set food on the land, when I realized (as several other folks already knew) that El Potrero had been pretty much left intact, along with several other Ranchos in that area, and ultimately became part of what is now the Santa Lucia Preserve.
Prior to the trip, I had been in touch with people at the Preserve to arrange a day for a visit. The Preserve is private land, about 22 acres, which was purchased with the explicit goal of putting up about 300 homes, a golf course and a few other recreational buildings, but leaving the bulk of the land virtually untouched or, in many cases, rehabilitated back to native California plants and animals. The Preserve is also made up of several Ranchos from the Mexican era, and has changed hands only a few times since then. That fact alone has prevented development, a real blessing beneath the curse of stolen Native lands. So yes, my 5x great-grandparent's land was still in much the same condition it was when they owned it; but, in order to get near the land at all, I needed permission.
It seemed easy at first, with folks at the Preserve sending me very welcoming emails in response to my queries, but when it came right down to organizing a day and time, no one seemed inclined to be very specific.
Ultimately, I flew out of Virginia without a firm date, but plenty of faith in the Ancestors. I knew I would get to El Potrero one way or another. In a secret place in my heart, I hoped to find Fructuoso's cattle brand, which (despite many books and papers on California rancho cattle brands) seemed to have been lost to the ages. Why was this brand so important to me? I don't have a clue. I just really wanted that sign, that mark - something that was as essential to my ancestor as a signature, a graphic statement of existence, of saying "I am here, this is my mark." I am pretty sure that neither Fructuoso nor his wife Yginia were literate, so anything actually handwritten by them doesn't exist. The brand might be as close as I could get to a mark that they themselves had invented. But I didn't say anything to anyone. It was a wish inside a wish. Privately, I worried that it was a silly thing to desire. Or maybe just plain old nerdy.
My first stop was at The Monterey County Historical Society, a small parcel of land in the Salinas Valley that looks deceptively unimpressive but is a powerhouse of information.
The folks at MCHS, with whom I had emailed earlier, had taken my "wish list" of names, places and topics to research and already done some of the digging. James Perry, Mona Gudgel and Barbara Brown, are enthusiastic guardians of their priceless collection, and every time I made a discovery, we all celebrated. For three days, I became very much a part of the big table surrounded by bookshelves in their office: white gloves, pencils only, and oh joy, digital photos allowed!
It's funny how research works. Part sweat, part luck, part Ancestral grace. On that first day, I made a huge discovery - or perhaps I should say, I was blessed to be discovered by a miracle: the actual hand-written record of Fructuoso's registration of his cattle brand.
I had requested this particular big red "Spanish/Mexican Record" book for something else, but I noticed as I leafed through it (looking for the indexed page number) that this volume had a substantial number of cattle brand registrations, complete with each rancho's brand itself on the page. I knew Fructuoso had run cattle (no big surprise; it's what he knew from spending his entire life in a mission that became rich from cattle hides, known as "Mission Dollars"); I thought, well, maybe there's a chance...
You see, there is very little information about Fructuoso's ownership of Rancho El Potrero. As radical and wonderful as it was - a Carmel Mission Indian ending up with the "potrero" or "pasture" of the mission - most history books tended to gloss over this quickly. The Mission brands are all recorded, of course. Here is the Carmel Mission's brand during the Mission Era:
and most historical records rush right past that, on to the American ownership of the land by the Sargents, a famous family name in California both before and after statehood.
No one seems to recognize what a gigantic accomplishment it was for a former "neofito" (new convert), an Indian neofito at that, to own, manage, and prosper on the land of his ancestors after that land had been so deeply and devastatingly colonized! Perhaps because Fructuoso was such an anomaly, maybe even an embarrassing reminder of the way California's missions stripped almost a million Indians of their homes (and 90% of their lives), he and his family have largely been forgotten.
This is what I love about mining archives. Indians appear in the archives not as ghosts, but as living, breathing human beings. In the Bancroft Library several years ago, I found a map (or "diseno," design) of El Potrero that even the Santa Lucia Preserve's historian had overlooked, making the land even more real in my mind (Fructuoso had passed on by then, but the "Joaquin Gutierrez" name on the diseno is his son-in-law, and all land records also add Fructuoso's daughter's name, Maria Estefana Real - although the land record below mistakenly identifies her as Maria Esteban!).
So I knew about El Potrero. I knew that Fructuoso de Jesus (his baptismal name, meaning "Fruit of Jesus") Cholom (his native name as recorded in the baptismal records) de Real (a name gleaned from his daughters' later association with Padre Real of Mission Carmel) had owned this land, and that his wife Yginia Yunisyunis, and later his daughter Estefana Real, and some of her children, had lived on this land for over ten years. Then, the land was lost. Lost, stolen, sold under false pretenses - that part, I wasn't sure about. That part, the historians gloss over.
One of the reasons I was skeptical, at best, about finding Fructuoso's cattle brand was a couple of xeroxed pages in my mom's papers. The pages are a from a hand-lettered little booklet she found somewhere which give brief pictorial histories of the California ranchos, along with owners, cattle brand, small map, and a photo if available (I can't tell you the name of the booklet, because she did not record it, but I saw an actual copy of it at MCHS myself - kicking myself for not jotting down the citation). Here is what the booklet had for El Potrero:
As you can see, in the upper left corner of the page is Sargent's cattle brand, and midway down the right side of the page is Joaquin Gutierrez's cattle brand. Gutierrez was briefly, as I have said, Fructuoso's son-in-law, and took over the rancho after Fructuoso's death. Although Fructuoso's name figures prominently in the center of the page, that's the only mention. His cattle brand, as in all collections of rancho brands, is absent.
All this is proof of absence - something common in Euro-American stories about Native claim to land in the United States. But the Mexican Records that I was privileged to view at the MCHS are amazing: a collection of thousands and thousands of hand-written documents, receipts, letters, reports, and scraps of paper all bound into about 15 volumes, complete with a hand-written index for each and every piece of paper. Can you imagine the work this was to compile?! James told me that it was a huge project done just prior to California Statehood by Americans who, in part, anticipated the coming court battles over land grants.
Plus, of course, these records are almost all in old Colonial Spanish (with a some important exceptions, as you'll see). Between the calligraphy and old Spanish, Mexican Spanish, faded ink and torn or missing sections of pages, these records take deep concentration to read, and a lot of "scanning" happens, when researchers just run their eyes over the page hoping that some key phrase, name or word pops out.
But I didn't need to be that systematic this time. Right there at the top of a page, in big black script, was a name that my whole body is attuned to recognize: FRUCTOSO DE JESUS.
Do you see it? In the left margin, the cattle brand Fructoso (as spelled here) registered for El Potrero. This is his official record of registration! It looks, in fact, like a stylized capital 'F' with a small 'o' attached to the foot, almost an abbreviation of his name. There is some mention of a Senora Gertrudis Lugo, who may be a witness. The date is October 1835 (I can't read the exact date yet), and the person signing the registration is Jose Maldonado, complete with his rubric, the fancy flourish every decent gentleman practiced as part of his signature.
I was stunned. I put my hand, white cotton glove and all, on the page, and thought to myself, "Fructuoso was here. 177 years ago, he stood in a room not too far from where I sit, just inches from this piece of paper. He may have even touched this paper himself, to check the brand, or to see his name written out...he was here. And now I'm here. Reading his name. Seeing his cattle brand. Witnessing, after all these years, what must have been a moment of incredible pride and joy for my ancestor: legal registration of his right to the land which had, at his birth, been home to the village of Echilat, where his maternal family originated. Here was a Mexican official, signing off on it."
I wondered if Fructuoso could feel me there. Was he just on the other side, looking back at me? The document was like a mirror; me on one side, Fructuoso on the other. Was he thinking of his descendents? Was he hoping they would one day see this? Or was he simply in a hurry to get back to the business of running a ranch?
I took many pictures of this document, but I am also going to formally request a hi-res scan. It is beautiful. In so many ways.
Later, James brought me a huge stack of probate records for Fructuoso's estate. Probate records?! I had no idea that any record of any kind chronicled what I had always guessed was a land-grab by Americans. Over and over, Isabel Meadows tells Harrington about Americans who would simply "esquate" (squat) on Indian lands, for which Indians had deeds and paperwork, and announce that it was theirs. I had not realized how many Indians took these Americans to court, hoping that the justice system would work (I also found paperwork for another ancestor, Paula Garibay, who did just that; but many other examples exist throughout this archive, and this semi-organized resistance to loss of land is something almost unknown that needs to be studied). Isabel herself says that Sargent kicked the Indians off El Potrero, with some details about a Chilean who was hired by Sargent to pretend he was buying the land from Indians so he could actually pass it on to Sargent (since Joaquin Gutierrez was a Chilean, this is a chilling thought, one that does not bode well for Fructuoso's daughter Estefana).
As it turns out, the mystery of what happened to El Potrero after his death was complicated and heart-breaking, and even with all of these records, I may never know the details for certain. The probate records (all in English!) go on for years after Fructuoso's death, five years in which his two daughters Josefa and Teodosia argue that their mother, Yginia, basically cut them out of their inheritance by selling the land to Gutierrez without their permission. There is no mention of Estefana, the third daughter, the one who was married to Gutierrez. Did she profit from the sale of the land to her husband? Did she cheat her sisters? Or was she, too, taken advantage of by Gutierrez and Sargent? Did Yginia really agree to sell the land of her own free will, or was she somehow tricked? Why would she favor Estefana over her other two daughters? It's true that Estefana and her children came to live on El Potrero, but some sources say that Josefa and Teodosia also lived on the land. In fact, in order to run such a large rancho (an itemization of Fructuoso's assets lists hundreds of head of cattle!), many Indians must have lived and worked there, and it makes sense that my ancestor would hire and house his own. So what happened between Yginia and two of her daughters?
It sounds messy. The distribution of inheritance has never been easy, it seems; add to that all kinds of historical trauma and post-colonial stress disorder, and you've got serious damage going on by all parties.
Here's what I think happened, in the end: by the time this court case was over, all of Fructuoso's impressive holdings - land, cattle, cash, tools - had to be sold in order to pay off the lawyers. There was nothing left to fight about. The patent to the land was awarded to Joaquin Gutierrez in 1862, but the whole case had taken so long that Gutierrez had already sold the land to Sargent, and Sargent was not going to give it back to either Gutierrez or the Real sisters Josefa and Teodosia; this court case went on through 1870. I have not found Estefana in any record after this time period, although I have seen a date for her death that is many years down the road. Likewise, Joaquin Gutierrez disappears from the records (he is not the same Don Joaquin Gutierrez who had a home in Monterey). Josefa and Teodosia go on, raising children and grandchildren, living in Carmel and Monterey, for some years.
It tore me up to read all this, to see on the page how families destroyed each other over land, money, material things.
But during this same visit to MCHS, I also faced a huge pile of probate records for the James Meadows estate.
I mean, LOOK at the number of times this probate went through court! that stack to the left of the three records is about 8 inches tall.
I have long wondered how the adult Meadows children (the offspring of their English father and Indian mother) ended up without much in the way of security after their wealthy father passed away; photographs of Isabel as a young girl and young woman show her dressed very expensively, her hair carefully styled, obviously the daughter of a wealthy rancho owner. And why, in his old age, was Thomas Meadows dependent on his sister Isabel to pay for groceries and rent, and why was Isabel herself willing to move 3,000 miles across the United States to live and work with Harrington (the Smithsonian ethnologist) for five years in her old age? Was she that dependent on her small income from Harrington? Well, how else would an elderly Indian woman from Carmel make enough money to send home to her siblings and other family members?
I really don't want to write this next part. In fact, I am purposely going to be very brief, because it is so painful. But the probate records say it all: James Meadows left the bulk of his estate to Isabel, with other large chunks going to his other children and the grandchildren he was raising (his son Edward had died earlier). However, James wrote in his will that he was purposely not leaving anything to his eldest son, Frank, because "I do not approve of his conduct or his mode of life." And Frank Meadows took that will to court with a vengeance.
At one point (and please, remember I am going on quick readings of the material at this point), Isabel actually gave up the main portion of her inheritance to Frank simply to close the will (given that her father mentioned in his will that one of Frank's problems with bad "conduct" consisted of trying to strangle his sister Isabel, this may have been a move made out of fear for her physical well-being, also); at first, Frank agreed to this, but later, he changed his mind, and more legal wrangling ensued. Years of this went by, and the same thing that happened to El Potrero happened to the James Meadows Tract, as his land was called. Eventually, the money ran out. Isabel had used all of her inheritance to fight her own brother. In the end, no one won except the lawyers, and both land and money were gone.
Isabel, who had grown up rather privileged and without needing to worry about where her next meal came from, no longer had a home, and her status in the community must have suffered drastically. In effect, she lost all of the white privilege granted to her by her father, and became just another poor Carmel Indian. Like Estefana, like Josefa, like Teodosia, and all of their children.
It is all too familiar. Then - and now. In-fighting. Back-stabbing. How deep do the wounds of missionization go? How much of the misbehavior in these two cases was the direct result of having to scrabble for daily survival in the missions, un-learning the collective village socialization and learning, for lack of a better phrase, how to look out for Number One? How much was caused by the introduction of alcohol, violence, the decimations of diseases, and much-reduced resources for food and shelter?
Did we forget how to be human? Can we remember? (in time?)
A few days after my last visit to MCHS, my sister Louise and I finally traveled to El Potrero. The Santa Lucia Preserve came through - although the person who really knew the history and the historical cites there was away on vacation, another employee named Chris became our guide, and he was wonderful.
More about that later. I can't write about that visit and these legal wranglings in the same post - it would take away from the presence of the land. For now, I'll close with the video I took of the heart of El Potrero, the place where we think Fructuoso and his family had their adobe, where they lived for many years, and built up a prosperous rancho together. It's a much quieter place now, no doubt; and the land has mostly recovered from the damage done to it by cattle. In fact, the land looks more like it did back when Fructuoso and Yunisyunis were born there, when it was their home village, and not part of the Carmel Mission at all. I find some comfort in knowing that this land is protected, and is not even on the Santa Lucia list of available house sites; it's a historic cite, and marked as such.
And there is comfort, too, in knowing that this land endures despite all of the human grief and mistakes that have happened there.
Listen to the wind.
You can read a little about my previous knowledge of El Potrero here. That was all written before I had set food on the land, when I realized (as several other folks already knew) that El Potrero had been pretty much left intact, along with several other Ranchos in that area, and ultimately became part of what is now the Santa Lucia Preserve.
Prior to the trip, I had been in touch with people at the Preserve to arrange a day for a visit. The Preserve is private land, about 22 acres, which was purchased with the explicit goal of putting up about 300 homes, a golf course and a few other recreational buildings, but leaving the bulk of the land virtually untouched or, in many cases, rehabilitated back to native California plants and animals. The Preserve is also made up of several Ranchos from the Mexican era, and has changed hands only a few times since then. That fact alone has prevented development, a real blessing beneath the curse of stolen Native lands. So yes, my 5x great-grandparent's land was still in much the same condition it was when they owned it; but, in order to get near the land at all, I needed permission.
It seemed easy at first, with folks at the Preserve sending me very welcoming emails in response to my queries, but when it came right down to organizing a day and time, no one seemed inclined to be very specific.
Ultimately, I flew out of Virginia without a firm date, but plenty of faith in the Ancestors. I knew I would get to El Potrero one way or another. In a secret place in my heart, I hoped to find Fructuoso's cattle brand, which (despite many books and papers on California rancho cattle brands) seemed to have been lost to the ages. Why was this brand so important to me? I don't have a clue. I just really wanted that sign, that mark - something that was as essential to my ancestor as a signature, a graphic statement of existence, of saying "I am here, this is my mark." I am pretty sure that neither Fructuoso nor his wife Yginia were literate, so anything actually handwritten by them doesn't exist. The brand might be as close as I could get to a mark that they themselves had invented. But I didn't say anything to anyone. It was a wish inside a wish. Privately, I worried that it was a silly thing to desire. Or maybe just plain old nerdy.
My first stop was at The Monterey County Historical Society, a small parcel of land in the Salinas Valley that looks deceptively unimpressive but is a powerhouse of information.
The folks at MCHS, with whom I had emailed earlier, had taken my "wish list" of names, places and topics to research and already done some of the digging. James Perry, Mona Gudgel and Barbara Brown, are enthusiastic guardians of their priceless collection, and every time I made a discovery, we all celebrated. For three days, I became very much a part of the big table surrounded by bookshelves in their office: white gloves, pencils only, and oh joy, digital photos allowed!
It's funny how research works. Part sweat, part luck, part Ancestral grace. On that first day, I made a huge discovery - or perhaps I should say, I was blessed to be discovered by a miracle: the actual hand-written record of Fructuoso's registration of his cattle brand.
I had requested this particular big red "Spanish/Mexican Record" book for something else, but I noticed as I leafed through it (looking for the indexed page number) that this volume had a substantial number of cattle brand registrations, complete with each rancho's brand itself on the page. I knew Fructuoso had run cattle (no big surprise; it's what he knew from spending his entire life in a mission that became rich from cattle hides, known as "Mission Dollars"); I thought, well, maybe there's a chance...
You see, there is very little information about Fructuoso's ownership of Rancho El Potrero. As radical and wonderful as it was - a Carmel Mission Indian ending up with the "potrero" or "pasture" of the mission - most history books tended to gloss over this quickly. The Mission brands are all recorded, of course. Here is the Carmel Mission's brand during the Mission Era:
and most historical records rush right past that, on to the American ownership of the land by the Sargents, a famous family name in California both before and after statehood.
No one seems to recognize what a gigantic accomplishment it was for a former "neofito" (new convert), an Indian neofito at that, to own, manage, and prosper on the land of his ancestors after that land had been so deeply and devastatingly colonized! Perhaps because Fructuoso was such an anomaly, maybe even an embarrassing reminder of the way California's missions stripped almost a million Indians of their homes (and 90% of their lives), he and his family have largely been forgotten.
This is what I love about mining archives. Indians appear in the archives not as ghosts, but as living, breathing human beings. In the Bancroft Library several years ago, I found a map (or "diseno," design) of El Potrero that even the Santa Lucia Preserve's historian had overlooked, making the land even more real in my mind (Fructuoso had passed on by then, but the "Joaquin Gutierrez" name on the diseno is his son-in-law, and all land records also add Fructuoso's daughter's name, Maria Estefana Real - although the land record below mistakenly identifies her as Maria Esteban!).
So I knew about El Potrero. I knew that Fructuoso de Jesus (his baptismal name, meaning "Fruit of Jesus") Cholom (his native name as recorded in the baptismal records) de Real (a name gleaned from his daughters' later association with Padre Real of Mission Carmel) had owned this land, and that his wife Yginia Yunisyunis, and later his daughter Estefana Real, and some of her children, had lived on this land for over ten years. Then, the land was lost. Lost, stolen, sold under false pretenses - that part, I wasn't sure about. That part, the historians gloss over.
One of the reasons I was skeptical, at best, about finding Fructuoso's cattle brand was a couple of xeroxed pages in my mom's papers. The pages are a from a hand-lettered little booklet she found somewhere which give brief pictorial histories of the California ranchos, along with owners, cattle brand, small map, and a photo if available (I can't tell you the name of the booklet, because she did not record it, but I saw an actual copy of it at MCHS myself - kicking myself for not jotting down the citation). Here is what the booklet had for El Potrero:
As you can see, in the upper left corner of the page is Sargent's cattle brand, and midway down the right side of the page is Joaquin Gutierrez's cattle brand. Gutierrez was briefly, as I have said, Fructuoso's son-in-law, and took over the rancho after Fructuoso's death. Although Fructuoso's name figures prominently in the center of the page, that's the only mention. His cattle brand, as in all collections of rancho brands, is absent.
All this is proof of absence - something common in Euro-American stories about Native claim to land in the United States. But the Mexican Records that I was privileged to view at the MCHS are amazing: a collection of thousands and thousands of hand-written documents, receipts, letters, reports, and scraps of paper all bound into about 15 volumes, complete with a hand-written index for each and every piece of paper. Can you imagine the work this was to compile?! James told me that it was a huge project done just prior to California Statehood by Americans who, in part, anticipated the coming court battles over land grants.
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| A sample of how the Mexican Record books are constructed from many different kinds of paperwork. |
Plus, of course, these records are almost all in old Colonial Spanish (with a some important exceptions, as you'll see). Between the calligraphy and old Spanish, Mexican Spanish, faded ink and torn or missing sections of pages, these records take deep concentration to read, and a lot of "scanning" happens, when researchers just run their eyes over the page hoping that some key phrase, name or word pops out.
But I didn't need to be that systematic this time. Right there at the top of a page, in big black script, was a name that my whole body is attuned to recognize: FRUCTOSO DE JESUS.
Do you see it? In the left margin, the cattle brand Fructoso (as spelled here) registered for El Potrero. This is his official record of registration! It looks, in fact, like a stylized capital 'F' with a small 'o' attached to the foot, almost an abbreviation of his name. There is some mention of a Senora Gertrudis Lugo, who may be a witness. The date is October 1835 (I can't read the exact date yet), and the person signing the registration is Jose Maldonado, complete with his rubric, the fancy flourish every decent gentleman practiced as part of his signature.
I was stunned. I put my hand, white cotton glove and all, on the page, and thought to myself, "Fructuoso was here. 177 years ago, he stood in a room not too far from where I sit, just inches from this piece of paper. He may have even touched this paper himself, to check the brand, or to see his name written out...he was here. And now I'm here. Reading his name. Seeing his cattle brand. Witnessing, after all these years, what must have been a moment of incredible pride and joy for my ancestor: legal registration of his right to the land which had, at his birth, been home to the village of Echilat, where his maternal family originated. Here was a Mexican official, signing off on it."
I wondered if Fructuoso could feel me there. Was he just on the other side, looking back at me? The document was like a mirror; me on one side, Fructuoso on the other. Was he thinking of his descendents? Was he hoping they would one day see this? Or was he simply in a hurry to get back to the business of running a ranch?
I took many pictures of this document, but I am also going to formally request a hi-res scan. It is beautiful. In so many ways.
Later, James brought me a huge stack of probate records for Fructuoso's estate. Probate records?! I had no idea that any record of any kind chronicled what I had always guessed was a land-grab by Americans. Over and over, Isabel Meadows tells Harrington about Americans who would simply "esquate" (squat) on Indian lands, for which Indians had deeds and paperwork, and announce that it was theirs. I had not realized how many Indians took these Americans to court, hoping that the justice system would work (I also found paperwork for another ancestor, Paula Garibay, who did just that; but many other examples exist throughout this archive, and this semi-organized resistance to loss of land is something almost unknown that needs to be studied). Isabel herself says that Sargent kicked the Indians off El Potrero, with some details about a Chilean who was hired by Sargent to pretend he was buying the land from Indians so he could actually pass it on to Sargent (since Joaquin Gutierrez was a Chilean, this is a chilling thought, one that does not bode well for Fructuoso's daughter Estefana).
As it turns out, the mystery of what happened to El Potrero after his death was complicated and heart-breaking, and even with all of these records, I may never know the details for certain. The probate records (all in English!) go on for years after Fructuoso's death, five years in which his two daughters Josefa and Teodosia argue that their mother, Yginia, basically cut them out of their inheritance by selling the land to Gutierrez without their permission. There is no mention of Estefana, the third daughter, the one who was married to Gutierrez. Did she profit from the sale of the land to her husband? Did she cheat her sisters? Or was she, too, taken advantage of by Gutierrez and Sargent? Did Yginia really agree to sell the land of her own free will, or was she somehow tricked? Why would she favor Estefana over her other two daughters? It's true that Estefana and her children came to live on El Potrero, but some sources say that Josefa and Teodosia also lived on the land. In fact, in order to run such a large rancho (an itemization of Fructuoso's assets lists hundreds of head of cattle!), many Indians must have lived and worked there, and it makes sense that my ancestor would hire and house his own. So what happened between Yginia and two of her daughters?
It sounds messy. The distribution of inheritance has never been easy, it seems; add to that all kinds of historical trauma and post-colonial stress disorder, and you've got serious damage going on by all parties.
Here's what I think happened, in the end: by the time this court case was over, all of Fructuoso's impressive holdings - land, cattle, cash, tools - had to be sold in order to pay off the lawyers. There was nothing left to fight about. The patent to the land was awarded to Joaquin Gutierrez in 1862, but the whole case had taken so long that Gutierrez had already sold the land to Sargent, and Sargent was not going to give it back to either Gutierrez or the Real sisters Josefa and Teodosia; this court case went on through 1870. I have not found Estefana in any record after this time period, although I have seen a date for her death that is many years down the road. Likewise, Joaquin Gutierrez disappears from the records (he is not the same Don Joaquin Gutierrez who had a home in Monterey). Josefa and Teodosia go on, raising children and grandchildren, living in Carmel and Monterey, for some years.
It tore me up to read all this, to see on the page how families destroyed each other over land, money, material things.
But during this same visit to MCHS, I also faced a huge pile of probate records for the James Meadows estate.
I mean, LOOK at the number of times this probate went through court! that stack to the left of the three records is about 8 inches tall.
I have long wondered how the adult Meadows children (the offspring of their English father and Indian mother) ended up without much in the way of security after their wealthy father passed away; photographs of Isabel as a young girl and young woman show her dressed very expensively, her hair carefully styled, obviously the daughter of a wealthy rancho owner. And why, in his old age, was Thomas Meadows dependent on his sister Isabel to pay for groceries and rent, and why was Isabel herself willing to move 3,000 miles across the United States to live and work with Harrington (the Smithsonian ethnologist) for five years in her old age? Was she that dependent on her small income from Harrington? Well, how else would an elderly Indian woman from Carmel make enough money to send home to her siblings and other family members?
I really don't want to write this next part. In fact, I am purposely going to be very brief, because it is so painful. But the probate records say it all: James Meadows left the bulk of his estate to Isabel, with other large chunks going to his other children and the grandchildren he was raising (his son Edward had died earlier). However, James wrote in his will that he was purposely not leaving anything to his eldest son, Frank, because "I do not approve of his conduct or his mode of life." And Frank Meadows took that will to court with a vengeance.
At one point (and please, remember I am going on quick readings of the material at this point), Isabel actually gave up the main portion of her inheritance to Frank simply to close the will (given that her father mentioned in his will that one of Frank's problems with bad "conduct" consisted of trying to strangle his sister Isabel, this may have been a move made out of fear for her physical well-being, also); at first, Frank agreed to this, but later, he changed his mind, and more legal wrangling ensued. Years of this went by, and the same thing that happened to El Potrero happened to the James Meadows Tract, as his land was called. Eventually, the money ran out. Isabel had used all of her inheritance to fight her own brother. In the end, no one won except the lawyers, and both land and money were gone.
Isabel, who had grown up rather privileged and without needing to worry about where her next meal came from, no longer had a home, and her status in the community must have suffered drastically. In effect, she lost all of the white privilege granted to her by her father, and became just another poor Carmel Indian. Like Estefana, like Josefa, like Teodosia, and all of their children.
It is all too familiar. Then - and now. In-fighting. Back-stabbing. How deep do the wounds of missionization go? How much of the misbehavior in these two cases was the direct result of having to scrabble for daily survival in the missions, un-learning the collective village socialization and learning, for lack of a better phrase, how to look out for Number One? How much was caused by the introduction of alcohol, violence, the decimations of diseases, and much-reduced resources for food and shelter?
Did we forget how to be human? Can we remember? (in time?)
A few days after my last visit to MCHS, my sister Louise and I finally traveled to El Potrero. The Santa Lucia Preserve came through - although the person who really knew the history and the historical cites there was away on vacation, another employee named Chris became our guide, and he was wonderful.
More about that later. I can't write about that visit and these legal wranglings in the same post - it would take away from the presence of the land. For now, I'll close with the video I took of the heart of El Potrero, the place where we think Fructuoso and his family had their adobe, where they lived for many years, and built up a prosperous rancho together. It's a much quieter place now, no doubt; and the land has mostly recovered from the damage done to it by cattle. In fact, the land looks more like it did back when Fructuoso and Yunisyunis were born there, when it was their home village, and not part of the Carmel Mission at all. I find some comfort in knowing that this land is protected, and is not even on the Santa Lucia list of available house sites; it's a historic cite, and marked as such.
And there is comfort, too, in knowing that this land endures despite all of the human grief and mistakes that have happened there.
Listen to the wind.
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