Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

The author’s father was Alfred Edward Miranda, Sr. (1927-2009). On both sides of his family, Al Miranda, Sr. was a direct descendant of the California “Mission Indians” and is the author’s sole connection to an Indigenous heritage. A rage-filled man with alcoholism and a propensity for violent outbursts, Al Miranda, Sr. served eight years in prison for a brutal rape.

Aside from the author, Al Miranda, Sr. is the most important figure in Bad Indians as well as its most ambivalent. On one hand, Miranda remembers a brief period of happiness while living under the same roof as her father. On the other hand, his anger and brutality made her teen years so difficult that she once contemplated shooting him in the head with a handgun while he was sleeping. Above all, her father connects Miranda to her Indigenous ancestors. For this reason, she devotes the book’s lengthiest section by far to her relationship with and feelings toward Al Miranda, Sr. She concludes that her father personified the legacy of violence that Indigenous people in California inherited from missionization. She composes a poem for him and comes as close as she can imagine to forgiveness.

The author’s mother, Madgel Eleanor Yeoman (1935-2001), was called “Midgie” or “Miche” by family members. Midgie’s parents moved from Nebraska to Los Angeles, California in the 1930s. A white woman of English, French, and Jewish descent, Midgie grew up in Beverly Hills and has no known connection to California’s “Mission Indians” aside from her disastrous marriage to Al Miranda, Sr. and her daughter Deborah.

In the book’s introduction, Miranda describes her mother as a slender, dark-haired dancer who caught Al Miranda’s eye because of her beauty. Midgie, however, was haunted by grief over the loss of a young daughter from her first marriage. Midgie drank heavily and used drugs, disappeared for long stretches of time, and left her surviving daughter neglected. Partly because of her absenteeism and partly because of her European heritage, Midgie effectively vanishes from Miranda’s book after a few scattered appearances. Miranda even composes an imagined future mythology of her “Mestiza Nation” in which she refers to herself throughout the piece as motherless.

Miranda’s half sister, Louise, who like Miranda shares a connection to California’s “Mission Indians” through their father, Al Miranda, Sr., wrote and published the first-ever Esselen-English dictionary. Although Louise doesn’t appear in Bad Indians until Part 4, her presence is significant. First, she’s the driving force behind Miranda’s participation in the Breath of Life conference at the University of California, Berkeley, a weeklong immersion in Indigenous languages. Second, through Louise, Miranda learns the true nature of her father’s long-ago crime, for which he was imprisoned. Knowing that her father had committed a brutal rape caused Louise to despise him so much that she refused to take his surname. For Miranda, however, the revelation produced reflections on missionization and its legacy of violence, which her father seemed to embody.

The author’s paternal grandfather, Tom Miranda (1903-1988) descended from the Carmel “Mission Indians” through both his father, Tomas Santos Miranda, and his mother, Maria Ines Garcia. Miranda doesn’t recall ever meeting her grandfather (though she learned that he attended her baptism in 1961). She knew so little about him that at one point she estimated that he died when she was about 14 years old, though the book’s section headings and genealogical chart cite the date of his death as September 6, 1988, just before Miranda turned 27.

Despite her lack of personal familiarity with her grandfather, Tom Miranda is a key figure in the book for one important reason: At some point in the mid- to late-20th century, Tom recorded a series of memories on audio cassettes, which Miranda then inherited and used in Part 3 under the heading “Tom’s Stories.” While Miranda adds editorial comments to these recollections, the words themselves belong to her grandfather. They’re verbatim transcripts. Miranda gives special emphasis to her grandfather’s memory of seeing “The Light from the Carrisa Plains” (the title of Part 3), which she interprets as a light from a sacred Indigenous location calling her grandfather home.

The author’s paternal great-grandfather was Tomas Santos Miranda (1877-1943). On his father’s side, Tomas Santos’s grandparents had traveled to California from Mexico around 1850, in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican American War. On his mother’s side, Tomas Santos’s grandparents had lived in the Carmel Mission before it closed. This means that Miranda is only five generations removed from her direct ancestors who survived the missions.

Miranda knows almost nothing about her great-grandfather Tomas Santos. Only one picture of him survives. She describes this picture at length near the end of Part 2, for she believes that in her great-grandfather’s face she sees traces of qualities she saw up-close in her father.

The author’s half brother, Al Miranda, Jr., her father’s son by another woman, shares Miranda’s darker complexion and Indigenous heritage. Al Miranda, Jr. appears in Bad Indians as a young boy, only four years old, whose father regularly beat him with a belt for transgressions such as crying or bed-wetting. This occurred when Miranda was a teen. Miranda describes loving her half brother more than any other human being she met in her young life. On many occasions, she took preemptive action to protect the boy from their father’s rage. Al Miranda, Jr. also appears briefly as an adult when he carries his father’s ashes to California for a funeral ceremony.

Related to the author only by marriage, Isabel Meadows (1846-1939), was born in Carmel, California, at the beginning of the Mexican-American War and died in Washington, DC, nearly a century later. In the 1930s, an elderly Isabel helped Smithsonian ethnologist J. P. Harrington preserve parts of the Esselen language.

Isabel appears in Part 1 of Bad Indians as the source of the story of young Vicenta Gutierrez’s rape at the hands of Padre Real. Miranda believes that Isabel made certain to share this and other stories with Harrington because she knew that in the future Indigenous women would need to hear them.