Miranda forges a vivid and urgent memoir of abuse and love. Her personal history is inseparable, as she presents it in Bad Indians, from fragments of the haunting tribal history of her Ohlone–Costanoan Esselen family and the story of her parents’ tumultuous mixed union. The resulting book is an unforgettable pastiche of personal reflection, oral histories, poems, photographs, diagrams, class lessons, thought experiments, and stark news clippings, including the titular headline about a purportedly “bad” Indian who responded to cruelty by going on a rampage. Tracing a line of structural violence, Miranda frames her critique of painful missionary mythology with the now mostly defunct mission project that Californians for decades constructed in fourth grade in public schools.•
BAD INDIANS: A TRIBAL MEMOIR, BY DEBORAH A. MIRANDA
