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julenetrippweaver 's review for:
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
by Deborah A. Miranda
Bad Indians, by Deborah Miranda is an excellent hybrid memoir recounting her family history and stories that address the genocide of Indian tribes in California. It includes poetry, documents, quotes, photos, diary excerpts, and drawings. It is a heartbreaking book that shows the intergenerational trauma through her family and the various tribes that lived on the land before they became slaves.
Throughout the book she addresses how the whites who came could not accept the Indians' respect toward what we call LGBTQ. She writes this history as an Indian lesbian. "The the soldiers came, the priests came, christened us joyas, jewels, laughing at how our tribes treated us—sodomites, nefando pecadoes, mujerados—as treasures? They called us monsters. Joya was a joke. But we had other names before that: aqi, coia, cuit, uluqui, endearments only the ancestors remember.
In the missions we were stripped bare, whipped, made to sweep the plaza for days, pointed at, cursed. "In the south, we fed your kind to our dogs," soldiers grinned, and stroked the heads of their mastiffs."
Further into the book in the section "To Make Story Again in the World" she writes, "Fourth graders, their parents, their teachers, tourists to the missions, often learn and perpetuate only one story about California Indians: conquest, subjugation, defeat, disappearance. Somehow, this story manages to get told without any real mention of the violence and violations that accompanied colonization. The mission dioramas, glossaries, coloring books pages, timelines, thrilling tales of the discovery of gold, forty-niner mining camp songs and accounts of the adventures of rowdy, good-natured frontiersmen all sidestep the realities of the physical, emotional, spiritual, and cultural pain, or death, required to bring about such iconic mythology. In short, the story is one-dimensional, flat, and worst of all, untrue."
"California Indians, however, have many other stories. They aren't easy; they are fractured. To make them whole, what is needed is a multilayered web of community reaching backward in time and forward in dream, questing deeply into the country of unknown memory—an extremely demanding task." She continues to tell a story about her grandfather as an example of a story that has two readings, one as an example of "foolishness," or one of a "mythological fantasy of some blood-memory of the connection between the indigeneity and land...."
At the beginning of the book she uses Linda Hogan's quote, "I am the result of the love of thousands." With a picture of her mother and father when they were in love, and dancing. The book is dedicated to her mother and father "who survived each other" in this book we meet the father when his daughter wants to get to know her father and her mother summons him. He has spent years in prison. He has another family. He tells her one thing, later she hears the full story. She sees her father's loving side, until he goes and brings his son home from another woman, then he changes. The son does not meet his beliefs of how a man behaves, he turns brutal, Deborah becomes her half brother's caregiver. Both of them meet brutality.
This book well deserved the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award. A blurb by Linda Hogan on the back cover, "For so long, Native writers and readers have opened books of our tribal history, archaeology, or anthropology and found that it is not the story we know...From the voice of the silenced, the written about and not written by, this book is groundbreaking not only as literature but as history."
It reminds me of Joy Harjo's memoir Poet Warrior. I recommend both of these books for a filling in of our American history.
Throughout the book she addresses how the whites who came could not accept the Indians' respect toward what we call LGBTQ. She writes this history as an Indian lesbian. "The the soldiers came, the priests came, christened us joyas, jewels, laughing at how our tribes treated us—sodomites, nefando pecadoes, mujerados—as treasures? They called us monsters. Joya was a joke. But we had other names before that: aqi, coia, cuit, uluqui, endearments only the ancestors remember.
In the missions we were stripped bare, whipped, made to sweep the plaza for days, pointed at, cursed. "In the south, we fed your kind to our dogs," soldiers grinned, and stroked the heads of their mastiffs."
Further into the book in the section "To Make Story Again in the World" she writes, "Fourth graders, their parents, their teachers, tourists to the missions, often learn and perpetuate only one story about California Indians: conquest, subjugation, defeat, disappearance. Somehow, this story manages to get told without any real mention of the violence and violations that accompanied colonization. The mission dioramas, glossaries, coloring books pages, timelines, thrilling tales of the discovery of gold, forty-niner mining camp songs and accounts of the adventures of rowdy, good-natured frontiersmen all sidestep the realities of the physical, emotional, spiritual, and cultural pain, or death, required to bring about such iconic mythology. In short, the story is one-dimensional, flat, and worst of all, untrue."
"California Indians, however, have many other stories. They aren't easy; they are fractured. To make them whole, what is needed is a multilayered web of community reaching backward in time and forward in dream, questing deeply into the country of unknown memory—an extremely demanding task." She continues to tell a story about her grandfather as an example of a story that has two readings, one as an example of "foolishness," or one of a "mythological fantasy of some blood-memory of the connection between the indigeneity and land...."
At the beginning of the book she uses Linda Hogan's quote, "I am the result of the love of thousands." With a picture of her mother and father when they were in love, and dancing. The book is dedicated to her mother and father "who survived each other" in this book we meet the father when his daughter wants to get to know her father and her mother summons him. He has spent years in prison. He has another family. He tells her one thing, later she hears the full story. She sees her father's loving side, until he goes and brings his son home from another woman, then he changes. The son does not meet his beliefs of how a man behaves, he turns brutal, Deborah becomes her half brother's caregiver. Both of them meet brutality.
This book well deserved the 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award. A blurb by Linda Hogan on the back cover, "For so long, Native writers and readers have opened books of our tribal history, archaeology, or anthropology and found that it is not the story we know...From the voice of the silenced, the written about and not written by, this book is groundbreaking not only as literature but as history."
It reminds me of Joy Harjo's memoir Poet Warrior. I recommend both of these books for a filling in of our American history.