Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

A one-page “genealogical” chart begins with the union of “Spain” and the “Catholic Church.” Their “offspring” include “Soldiers,” “Rape,” “Franciscans,” and “Missionization/Land Theft.” The final “generation” lists “Domestic Violence,” “Alcoholism,” “Clinical Depression,” “Poverty,” and a dozen other consequences of the original union.

This one-page poem is based on the writings of an 18th-century Spanish priest named Junipero Serra, one of the founders of the Spanish missions. The poem features seven stanzas. The second line of each stanza appears again as the first line of the next stanza. The poem’s theme is Spanish soldiers shooting Indigenous men while lassoing and then raping Indigenous women.

This two-page poem, also based on Junipero Serra’s writings, consists of 11 stanzas with repetition of lines from one stanza to another. Its major theme is the metaphorical capture of naked Indigenous people “in the apostolic and evangelical net” (4).

Miranda describes this 14-page “glossary” as “excerpts from a very late fourth grade project” (6). She “defines” the following terms, each of which receives its own heading and at least one paragraph: adobe bricks, bells, discipline, flogging, cat-o’-nine tails, corma, cudgel, mission, neofito (neophyte), and padre. Most of these “definitions” include substantial sarcasm. The instructions for making adobe bricks, for instance, appear in the form of a “recipe” (7) in which “the ingredients are free for the taking—but you will certainly go through a lot of Indians” (8). On the frequent flogging of “Mission Indians,” Miranda writes that “[t]hose must have been very bad Indians” (13). The mission itself she “defines” as a “Massive Conversion Factory” with converts “to be spewed out the back end” (16).

This one page, pulled from Miranda’s daughter’s mission-inspired coloring book, features a colorable mission bell, a paragraph on Father Junipero Serra’s founding of the Carmel Mission in the late 18^th century, and colorable images of an “Indian,” a “friar,” and a “soldier.” Miranda underlines nine phrases in the page’s lone paragraph and adds editorial “corrections” in the form of comments in the margins. Where a sentence begins, for instance, “A wooden chapel and the needed buildings were erected in 6 months,” Miranda underlines the phrase “were erected,” draws a line from this phrase to the page’s margins, and then adds, “Note use of passive voice to avoid saying enslaved Indians built it” (21). She also adds editorial comments to the colorable images of “Indian,” “friar,” and “soldier.”

This is an imagined letter from Miranda to a young Indigenous girl from the early 19th century named Vicenta Gutierrez. One day, after confession, Vicenta reported to her family that a priest, Padre Real, had raped her inside the church. Miranda’s letter reveals that Vicenta’s story, as well as others like it, survived in the early 20th-century recollections of Fernando Librado and Isabel Meadows, descendants of “Mission Indians” who shared these stories with English ethnologist J. P. Harrington of the Smithsonian Institution. Additionally, Miranda’s letter reveals that she herself was raped as a child, at an age “way before fourth grade” (24). Miranda doubts whether anyone or anything could bring Vicenta justice, but she applauds Vicenta for her courage in telling the story and notes that it might inspire similar courage in the 34% of Indigenous women who still endure rape, in nearly all cases by non-Indigenous perpetrators.

Miranda notes that Isabel Meadows, whom she introduced in the previous section, served as an important source for ethnologist J. P. Harrington—and that she’s related to Miranda by marriage. The section opens with a 1934 photo of Meadows, who was nearly 90 years old at the time. Miranda believes “that Isabel herself knew the power of story” (28) and meant to convey it to her own descendants, which is why she spoke with Harrington and allowed him to commit these oral traditions to writing.

Miranda crafts an imagined, first-person reflection from the perspective of a man named Victor Acedo, referred to in Harrington’s notes from 1934 and 1937 as a joto, a derogatory Mexican-Spanish word for a gay man. In the imagined memory, Victor recalls the days when he and others like him “dressed in skirts of tule or deerskin” and “worked hard, side by side with our sisters” (31). Then the Spaniards came. The jotos, now mocked and persecuted, became outcasts even among their own people. “Victor” wonders why he has been forgotten for so long.

Miranda describes an incident from her childhood when she watched, helpless, while her rage-filled father beat his four-year-old son, Al, Jr., her half brother, with a leather belt. Interspersed with this section’s narrative are five excerpts from historical writings attributed to four different California missions (presumably to Spanish priests who staffed those missions): San Diego, San Gabriel, San Miguel, and San Antonio. Each excerpt reveals that, from the perspective of each non-Indigenous writer, Indigenous people love their children to excess and are reluctant to administer punishment. Miranda insists that “this beating” constitutes “part of our inheritance” (34) from the violence of the missions.