In Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians, she invokes many instances of violence, historical erasure, and a sense of questioning identity both in personal situations, and in simply talking about the brutality of colonialism, and its effects in the scheme of historical consciousness. In reading it, it causes the reader to think about why she does this, and what end goal it may achieve. Michael Dorris’ piece Indians on the Shelf puts the erasure of Native American culture into a context in which erasure is portrayed as a rewriting of a history. Miranda’s tribal memoir constantly critiques, and reconstructs the history of a people systematically erased by the American government, using many different types of documents. This helps further illustrate how the winners really do write the history when it comes to the American education system, but also shows how much of an impact the breaking of silence has. Miranda shows the instances of abuse in her own family, as well as including a “genealogy of violence” to start and finish the first section in her book. Reflecting on why she chose to do this, I felt as though she included this to show not only how violence can be passed down from generation to generation (ie the fact that in the missions, Native people were subjected to unspeakable violence, and the direct desecendant now abuses his own family), but speaks to a sense of identity and the question of it. She does not include her own family tree, because she wants to take a stand against constantly having to prove her identity in an age where there are many tribes fighting for recognition from the American federal government, and even recognition within a tribe. This is complicated within itself, because in order to think about her identity as an Ohlone/Esselen woman, she has to come to terms with her own identity in terms of her family and an abusive father, as he is the one who’s lineage she had to go through for membership in this tribe. In writing a tribal memoir that focuses so heavily on violence, Miranda had a choice. She could have written a novel that further placed Native people in the victim role, but instead chooses to battle this traditional Native American narrative, and speaks out in order to have her story told and not be erased. “But through this mark you will know I was here, and I know you are coming after me. We have stories to exchange about this difficult gift, life, and those stories will never disappear.” (Miranda, 122) This is so powerful, because in one statement she acknowledges the importance with which it falls on her to say the things she needs to, as she knows that being a Native American woman is difficult and comes with prejudices attached to her. She realizes that people will come after her, and they will be the ones who will also need to do a fair share of telling, so that the stories that are so incredibly important do not get erased. In Dorris’ and Miranda’s pieces, we see how many people assume that Indians or “real Indians” are all dead and gone, and essentially figments of the imagination. Miranda uses humor, and shares the story of the young 4th grader while Dorris uses many instances of people from around the world thinking they know everything there is to know about Indians simply because they played “cowboys and Indians” as a child.
We live in such a world where the winners write the history, and Junipero Serra’s canonization this month really makes me think about how true this is. The California missions were awful places, where harsh brutality occurred quite often, and this man, who approved and had a lot of the violence executed gets to go down in history as a hero, with claims that he “saved Indians from hell”? I think that this canonization of him is not okay because of all the intense feelings.