Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Deborah A. Miranda’s 2013 book, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, tells the tragic story of California’s “Mission Indians” and their descendants, including Miranda’s family, surviving members of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation. The book won a 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award gold medal. A Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, Miranda combined documentary evidence, autobiography, and literary creativity, including her own poetic compositions, to produce a work that is part history and part imagination. This hybrid approach allowed her to amplify emotional experiences, often of a personal nature, while maintaining the story’s chronological structure.

The story begins in the late 18th century, when Catholic priests, aided by Spanish soldiers, established a network of 21 missions to “civilize” and Christianize California’s Indigenous people. Subjugated by force, these groups endured various forms of brutality that left Indigenous communities, cultures, and languages broken beyond repair. The result was nothing less than a demographic holocaust: California’s Indigenous population plummeted from a pre-colonization high of around one million to approximately 20 thousand a century later. Miranda tells this story as a “tribal memoir” because she traces her ancestry to California’s “Mission Indians” through her father, Al Miranda, Sr. The complex story is marked by ambivalent feelings because Al Miranda, Sr.