Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Miranda narrates her personal journey from a childhood filled with horrific violence to the moment she found love with other women. She divides this section into seven subsections, each with a Roman numeral and a title related to “Silver” (though she doesn’t identify these as separate subsections in the book’s Table of Contents): “I. Forge,” “II. Sheath,” “III. Whetstone,” “IV. Unsheathed,” “V. Cutting Edge,” “VI. Crucible,” and “VII. Reforged.”

Miranda recalls her “earliest memory”: seeing her father press a knife to her mother’s throat (108). As a toddler, Miranda herself wielded a butter knife against a neighbor boy who must have said something mean to her. She feared her own anger. Her father went to prison, and her mother remarried and moved to Washington State, where mother, daughter, and stepfather lived in a trailer. Miranda remembers her cousins’ cruelty toward her during Sunday visits to her aunts and uncles. Because her new husband was often away, Miranda’s mother befriended a married man named Buddy. At first, Buddy treated Miranda well, braiding her hair and taking her swimming with her best friend, Hannah, who was six years old, one year younger than Miranda. One day, Buddy raped the girls. Miranda didn’t tell anyone, partly “because at seven years old [she didn’t] have the words to describe” it and partly “because there [was] nobody who want[ed] to hear” (112).