Bad Indians is the sacred text and story of California, the book that sits beside me when I write, the book I have given to all of my daughters, the book I give to people I love when they need to know the deeply-sung truths and revelations of this state, of this world. Deborah Miranda writes of hundreds of years of children, parents, love and despair and love again, here in a land beloved and stolen and cherished. With tenderness and fiercely lyrical beauty, she takes apart myth and resurrects the branches of her own trees, as no one else ever could.-Susan Straight, author of Mecca and In the Country of Women
Bad Indians stands out as a classic quintessentially Indigenous memoir. It is a powerful text that demonstrates, through a merging of personal storytelling, history, and gathering of testimony, a meta-story of generational trauma and triumph. It is the best book of its kind and will continue to be an essential text in California, national, and world history.-Joy Harjo
In
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, we learn about the Indigenous people of California from the 16th century to the present. What was and is day-to-day life for them? How much has been erased from our history books? How do we begin to dispel the myth that Native Americans are a people of the past? We start here.-
Brea Baker,
ELLE magazine
I teach this book to my students in every creative nonfiction class and am excited by it every time. It is a powerful example of how memoir can be what we want it to be. This is a fearless and beautiful book.-Sasha taq sablu LaPointe, author of Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk
For anyone and everyone who likes to listen to and tell stories and who believes in the liberating power of story.-Jonah Raskin, Anderson Valley Advertiser
Essential for all of us who were taught in school that the 'Mission Indians' no longer existed in California, Bad Indians combines tribal and family histories, tape recordings, and the writings of a white ethnologist who spoke with Miranda's family, together with photographs, old reports from the mission priests to their bishops, and newspaper articles concerning Indians from the nearby white settlements. Miranda takes us on a journey to locate herself by way of the stories of her ancestors and others who come alive through her writing. It's such a fine book that a few words can't do it justice.''-Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Ceremony and The Turquoise Ledge
Bad Indians brings the human story of California's indigenous community sharply into focus. It's a narrative long obscured and distorted by celebrations of Christian missionaries and phony stories about civilization coming to a golden land. No other history of California's indigenous communities that I know of presents such a moving, personal account of loss and survival.-Frederick E. Hoxie, Swanlund Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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. It does not include the people we know. It does not tell the stories of the heart or the relationships that were, and are, significant in any time. When we write our own books, they do not fit the 'record,' as created by and confirmed by outside views. From the voice of the silenced, the written about and not written by, this book is groundbreaking not only as literature but as history.-Linda Hogan, author ofRounding the Human Corners and a faculty member for the Indigenous Education Institute
This multi-genre memoir uses archives in all senses of the word, as well as imaginative writing, to render a prismatic and complex story about [Miranda's] own family and the history of colonization in California from the Spanish missions of the 1700s to present.-Sarah Neilson, Mental Floss
Miranda's research into her family history, indigenous Californians, is the grounding cable for her to tell their collective tribal story. The book is full of photo slides, obtained through her meticulous research, as she writes to humanize the people within them; some of them her direct ancestors. Through Miranda's poetic lyricism and objective research we cannot help but feel them through the lens.-Marlena Gates, Electric Literature
