by Deborah A. Miranda
Look closely at the cover image of this book: it is a childhood photo this author, Deborah A. Miranda. She is a descendent of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen peoples who first encountered the Franciscan founders of Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, now known as the Carmel Mission. Bad Indians is packed with family photographs, oral histories, letters, and anthropological field notes that document the history of her family and her tribe, yet they were declared “extinct” decades ago and are not a recognized tribe according to the U.S. Government.
Miranda debunks the myth of the “happy Indian” working the fields and kitchens of the Mission system up and down California with documented contemporaneous accounts of priest abuse from rape to torture. Eventually the missions ran out of Native peoples to funnel into the labor required for their operations, so they failed and crumbled, leaving their Native residents even more destitute than they were when they were essentially enslaved. By then, being identifiable as an “Indian” in California was so dangerous that many former Mission dwellers rebranded themselves as “Mexican,” so as to evade the government sanctioned genocide that decimated Native communities all over the state during the 19th century.
Like every child raised in the California school system, I learned what passed for Native history during the fourth grade “Mission project.” Miranda was visiting Dolores Mission in San Francisco one day when she encountered a mother filming her fourth-grade daughter giving a tour of the Mission as an alternative to the traditional assignment of building a Mission replica out of sugar cubes or popsicle sticks. The mother remarked to Miranda how unfortunate it was that there were no more Indians they could talk to to find out what life there had really been like. When Miranda identified herself as a real-live descendent of the actual Mission Indians, the little girl’s face drained in fear as if Miranda had just risen from the dead before her very eyes. Many California school children like her and like me were eventually surprised to find out that surviving Native communities exist all over Calfornia and the U.S.
Bad Indians is an important and a difficult read, but in the current political climate of historical denial, it is more urgent than ever that we stop whitewashing the past and continue to refine our understanding of our nation’s history.