Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

In the mid-19th century, an American named Sargent (identified later as Bradley Sargent, who served as a California senator) cheated Miranda’s direct ancestors out of their land at Rancho El Potrero. Years later, Sargent died from an illness he contracted shortly after falling into the Carmelo River. Isabel Meadows recalls that an Indigenous woman named Ularia had spoken to the river after Sargent drove Miranda’s ancestors off the land. Meadows believes that “Ularia gave the river the idea to curse Sargent,” so the river killed Sargent and thus “cleansed itself of his greed” (42).

This one-paragraph is excerpted from the writings of O. P. Fitzgerald, a Southern Methodist minister who spent more than two decades in California. Fitzgerald describes the “Digger Indian” as one who “holds a low place in the scale of humanity” because “one Digger is uglier than another, and an old squaw caps the climax” (43)

Miranda explains that the “Digger” epithet for the Northern Californian Indigenous people has connotations similar to the “n-word.” These “Diggers” weren’t “Mission Indians” but members of tribes who somehow had escaped missionization before the Gold Rush onslaught of 1849, when the US government paid bounties for Indigenous scalps. Other Indigenous people were sold into slavery, a practice that persisted unofficially in California for many years following the US Civil War. The “Belles” in this section title appear in two different photos. The first, entitled “A Digger Belle,” features a young, topless Indigenous woman with spiked hair—a cultural sign, Miranda explains, of recent mourning. The second is a photo entitled “The Belles of San Luis Rey,” in which three elderly Indigenous women are seated amid the ruins of an old mission, overgrown by grass and weeds. Use of the word “Belle” in photographs of Indigenous women, who don’t appear at their physical best or most vibrant, seems to have originated in a kind of cruel mockery, though it’s also a play on the mission bells.

This one-page section features a California Indian Herald newspaper article from 1922, announcing that the US government formally recognized “Miwok” as the appropriate tribal name for a group of Indigenous peoples hitherto appearing in government documents as “Diggers.” A corresponding photograph shows Indigenous people burning the name “Digger” in effigy.

In the form of a short poem, Miranda celebrates the burning-in-effigy of both the “Digger” name and the bigoted assumptions behind it, such as “thirst for alcohol” and “lust for white women” (52).

This short poem is based on a 2004 Reuters article about a “lone whale” in the Pacific Ocean that doesn’t behave as other whales do, and whose “calls do not match those of any known species of whale” (54).

Drawing on Sacramento and San Francisco newspaper accounts from the 1850s, Miranda composes five short poems, all of which describe violence against local Indigenous people. In four of the five accounts, the violence appears unprovoked and is simply reported as news.

This seven-stanza poem depicts Jacinta Gonzalez, an Indigenous healer whose skills with traditional medicine once helped nurse the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson back to health: “My plants gave him back his breath. Together, we dreamt words to clear his head, ordered poison to leave. The rest is history” (62).

Miranda devotes the remainder of Part 2 to the story of her great-grandfather, Tomas Santos Miranda, whom she describes as “the bridge between missionization and post-secularization” (73). Miranda admits to knowing very little about her great-grandfather, though she explains that Tomas Santos’s father Tranquilino Miranda, born in Mexico, married Severiana Ramirez, an Esselen woman whose parents had lived in the Carmel Mission earlier in the 19th century. Tomas Santos Miranda was born in 1877. In 1901, Tomas Santos married an Esselen woman from Carmel, Maria Ines Garcia, the author’s great-grandmother. Although Severiana Ramirez and Maria Ines Garcia give her a clear connection to the Esselen people, Miranda complains that the US government, because of “careless record keeping” in the early 20th century, “still does not recognize our existence as tribal people” (69). In 1978 and 1979, Miranda’s grandfather, Thomas Anthony (Tom) Miranda, made cassette recordings of his own memories, but he says little about his father, Tomas Santos. The author has only one surviving photograph of her great-grandfather. For nearly three pages, she describes what she thinks she sees in her great-grandfather based on his pose and countenance. In short, he looks to be a fighter, a man she imagines not as cruel but as “dangerous,” for “he has seen too much pain, witnessed too many of his loved ones killed, known too much injustice to even imagine that justice might exist somewhere” (72).