Description

Alta Journal California Book Club Pick 2023
Winner, PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award
Winner, 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold Medal for Autobiography/Memoir
Shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
“Bad Indians is the sacred text and story of California, the book that sits beside me when I write, the book I have given to all of my daughters, the book I give to people I love when they need to know the deeply-sung truths and revelations of this state, of this world. Deborah Miranda writes of hundreds of years of children, parents, love and despair and love again, here in a land beloved and stolen and cherished. With tenderness and fiercely lyrical beauty, she takes apart myth and resurrects the branches of her own trees, as no one else ever could.”–Susan Straight, author of Mecca and In the Country of Women
“Bad Indians stands out as a classic quintessentially Indigenous memoir. It is a powerful text that demonstrates, through a merging of personal storytelling, history, and gathering of testimony, a meta-story of generational trauma and triumph. It is the best book of its kind and will continue to be an essential text in California, national, and world history.”–Joy Harjo
“In Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, we learn about the Indigenous people of California from the 16th century to the present. What was and is day-to-day life for them? How much has been erased from our history books? How do we begin to dispel the myth that Native Americans are a people of the past? We start here.”– Brea Baker, ELLE magazine”A desperately needed correction to centuries of fantasy and whitewashing. […] Miranda’s dialogic kit is rich and deep, and it uses archival aesthetics to create a story that is as full of information and lacunae as California history itself. Accepting that some parts of her family’s past will never be retrievable gives Miranda the chance to allow readers to appreciate how much was destroyed in the history of contact between California’s Native tribes and the Mexican and European settlers who came to establish the mission system.” –John Freeman