Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

Miranda introduces two interconnected California stories. The first is the story of her parents, Madgel Eleanor Yeoman and Alfred Edward Miranda. Her mother Madgel, called “Midgie” or “Miche,” was a slender, dark-haired, white woman whose parents had moved to California from Nebraska in the 1930s. Miranda’s father, Alfred, called “Al,” traced his ancestry to the Chumash and Esselen, who endured life inside the Spanish missions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Midgie and Al had a tumultuous marriage filled with alcohol and drug misuse, severe grief on her part, and rage and violence on his. Miranda describes her parents’ calamitous union as a microcosm of the larger encounter between the European colonizers and Indigenous people in California. This is her second story. She considers herself a “mixed-blood” “Mission Indian,” laments the loss of her ancestors’ language, and believes that much can be recovered through storytelling. She denounces California’s fourth-grade “Mission Unit,” which “is all too often a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny rather than actually educational or a jumping off point for critical thinking or accurate history” (xvii). She recalls that on a 2008 visit to one of the 21 missions, now tourist attractions, she encountered a mother and her fourth-grade daughter who were in the process of recording a video for the girl’s mission project.