Good, Bad, Dead and Living Indians

Over the summer I read Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir by Deborah Miranda. The book as the title suggests is a memoir that combines personal, historical, creative, and critical commentary about the lived realities and contemporary effects of colonization on California Indian descendants.

Miranda provides a unique and refreshing perspective through vignettes about her childhood that include descriptions of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and the inheritance of intergenerational trauma inflicted from colonial wounds on her family/tribe. She embeds beautifully wrought poetry about Spanish, Mexican, and American colonial encounters with California’s first peoples to critique the dominant master narratives that persist today.

A Tribal Memoir by Deborah A. Miranda

In the opening pages of the book she shares a story about her visit to the Mission Dolores  where she and a friend witness a mother with her fourth-grade daughter filming the child’s Mission Project. Miranda’s presence, she tells us, as a living breathing member of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation disrupts the child’s Mission Project and sends her into a psychological state of paralysis. While the eager mother is excited to have the chance-meeting with Miranda, the child, “was shocked into silence. Her face drained, her body went stiff, and she stared at me as if I had risen … from beneath the clay bricks of the courtyard. … Having me suddenly appear in the middle of her video project must have been a lot like turning the corner to find the (dead) person you were talking about suddenly in your face, talking back” (xix).

Miranda uses this anecdote to illustrate the continued effect of imperial epistemology. “Can you imagine,” she reflects, “teaching about slavery in the South while simultaneously requiring each child to lovingly reconstruct a plantation model” (xvii)? The Mission Indian mythology created an image of docile, subservient, domesticated, and dead Indians in California. The Mission Project taught to most fourth graders in California is “a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny.”  To combat this colonial archive of history, Miranda urges California Indians to protest and “make waves” through cultural activism and sharing our family stories that present counter narratives to dominant history.

On a trip to a local superstore in late July, I found myself in a similar situation as Miranda. My fourteen year-old daughter and I were browsing a sales rack, when a mother and her son soon joined us. We were all rummaging through various household objects, throw pillows and blankets, decorative rugs, etc. when I tuned into the other pair’s conversation. The mother wanted her son to choose a blanket to take with him to summer camp. I smiled as I casually eavesdropped because my daughter just returned from her first summer camp in Washington.

Soon after this thought ran through my head, I turned to the boy’s mother, as I am apt to do on impulse, and said, “where is your son going to camp?” I figured he would say somewhere in Julian where we live since we are surrounded  by at least five youth camps managed by the YMCA and various Christian denominations. I was unprepared for the response her son gave me.

“I am going to Mataguay. It is near Borrego,” he said. My smile froze on my face, and I told the boy that I knew exactly where Mataguay was located. In fact, I said, “my ancestors are buried there.” He looked a little stunned when I explained that Mataguay is an old Kumeyaay village, and the cemetery and adobe house on the property were lived in up until the early 20th century by my ancestors before they were forced onto the Santa Ysabel Indian Reservation. He listened attentively to my remarks, then said, “I think we get to camp out at the cemetery.” I am sure I visibly winced at his reply as I half-heartedly said, “have fun.”

Mataguay now is a Boy Scout Reserve and is surrounded by private landholdings and grazing lands that BLM manages. This past spring, I taught an upper division Ethnic Studies course about Native Americans in San Diego. I provided my students with a history of tribal resistance, an explanation about local Indian land tenure and stewardship, the devastating effects of the reservation system on traditional Native life, culture, economy, and well being. The class also included several American Indian Community Immersion trips where I took students out to community events on tribal lands so that they could see what contemporary tribal life is like: vibrant, dynamic, and thriving.

Our final Immersion trip was a  visit to Santa Ysabel–to my home. We began our visit at the Mission Santa Ysabel. Stan Rodriguez, my esteemed cultural mentor and Native speaker/teacher joined us to talk about the holdings in the mission museum. I also showed the students our repatriation site and the memorial in our cemetery for our tribal veterans; we discussed the sharp and intense pride that Santa Ysabel has for its veterans, its modern-day warriors who fight for a country that would have exterminated them but because this is still our homeland, our Indian country, and this warrior impulse to defend our lands creates a pride, a need that cannot be erased by reservation boundaries, blood quantum, or any other colonial attempt at erasure.

Next, we drove over to Mataguay–located just off of Highway 79 between Lake Henshaw and Warner Springs. This is the ancestral village of my great-great grandparents: Antonio and Andrea Cuevas. I shared with the students what I know about my family’s genealogy. I also expressed my feeling of nostalgia and melancholy in thinking about the removal of my great-great grandparents from their home–and what their lives must have been like after they were forced to take refuge in the canyons of Vulcan mountain where they literally had to rebuild their lives. My stepdad told me that his father (Martin Osuna) was 10 years old when the people were forced to move out, and that his dad’s grandmother cried for weeks and weeks after their removal. Martin remembered turning one last time as they climbed the slopes of Vulcan mountain to see their fields being trampled by the Calvary’s horses and their crops burned. These memories washed over me and the collision of the present with the past flooded my mind with a million different emotions as my daughter and I drove home from shopping.

How the Indian removal of my family/tribe was really only one generation removed from me.  How my parent’s grandparents were the first reservation inhabitants–born “free” and then forced onto the reservation. How my great-great grandparents were violently oppressed, colonized, relocated, and forcibly assimilated. How what is left of our family and extended family is fractured and dislocated on so many levels.

The lived reality, the “felt knowledge” of my experience, my mother’s experience, her mother’s experience, and my great-grandmother’s experiences are still raw and open wounds–so much so that when I tried to share some of what I was thinking with my daughter that my voice cracked and tears welled up in my eyes. Her life is so different from mine as is mine from theirs (my grandmothers). I have actively, conscientiously made choices with my life and made decisions with my husband to raise our children in an environment where they are safe and protected from the pain, experiences, and loss that I endured like my mother and her mother before her. But I also know that if I do not create the opportunities to tell our stories, to speak up and shatter the silence, then the trauma is in danger of being passed on.

So I tell my daughter what I think she is capable of understanding. She “gets it” on a certain intellectual level and she sees some of it in the way our family functions.  I have given her local histories to read, poetry, and short stories. It makes her mad and indignant to learn about her ancestors’s fate and the hardships they endured. I try to explain to her that colonialism is a sickness, an invisible disease; if we let it fester inside us, like a virus, it will rot our core sense of who we are, where we are from, and where we rightly belong in the world. Too many of us lower our eyes to avoid the painful and sometimes searing reflection of our past staring us in the face of our present.  But when I look into my daughter’s eyes and the eyes of other youth–like my students, like the boy at the superstore going to camp out in my ancestor’s burial ground–I am reminded that our work as educators as Indian people is still urgent and necessary.

Miranda’s book was timely reading for me. Her story, resonated with me; sent shock waves throughout me and my consciousness–jarring me out of the comfort of my daily routines to assess where I am in this present moment, what I am doing to support, resist, and challenge the status quo.

In the end, I believe I am on the right path:  teaching about local tribal life in my academic work, working with tribal leaders and partners to make our lands/people safer and more resilient, I am validating the lessons I learned from my family, their experiences, their struggles, their losses, their recovery, their continued resistance and perseverance.

It is a shame that the young boy I met who slept at the old cemetery in Mataguay will not learn any of these things. It is more shameful that the majority of California students will never know more about California Indian history other than the Mission Projects that Miranda also abhors.

In the end, whether we are good Indians, hurt Indians, “bad” Indians, or battle-weary and tired Indians; we all know that decolonization is a long, long process–but we must be its advocates in our daily lives, in our professional lives, and in our tribal homes. We are all colonized, Indian and non-Indian alike, and our work as educators must continue to demystify, historically redress, and strengthen our communities.