This essay on Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, is a meditation on the significance of California Indian women’s stories of survival and resistance. I take inspiration from a few sections of Bad Indians in order to tell other California Indian stories. I respond to questions Miranda poses in her text with speculative narratives of history, stories about bears and salmon, and an old family story that leaves me with no easy way to feel. I argue that stories reassert California Indians’ presence on our homelands in spite of the ceaseless efforts of the state to remove us. 

Policing, Incarceration, and Dispossession: California Indians and Carceral Statecraft examines the interconnected relationship between conquest and the formation of the carceral settler state in northwestern California, centering the experiences of my people, the Hupa. Policing, Incarceration, and Dispossession is an interdisciplinary critical Indigenous studies project which traces the carceral logics of genocide, surveillance, containment, and removal across different sites of conquest, demonstrating their endemicity to settler state formation. In northwestern California, military forts, settler domestic space, and the bordertown are sites of conquest through which the occupying settler state enacts carceral violence against Indigenous peoples as a strategy of ongoing dispossession and statecraft. Centering northwestern California in my analysis reveals that Indigenous dispossession requires a sustained carceral structure that enables the expansion of the state’s capacity to discipline Native resistance. This research contributes to the existing scholarship on the prison-industrial complex and addresses the understudied intersection of carceral violence and colonial conquest in California. Centering this region in my analysis of the carceral settler state also makes visible abolitionist genealogies of California Indian resistance. My analysis of conquest and carceral statecraft enriches the history of the prison-industrial complex with the stories of California Indian peoples who continue to resist state practices of genocide, surveillance, containment and removal. Stories of California Indian resistance challenge their erasure and shed light on the carceral experiences of Native peoples living under settler state occupation. Ultimately, I argue that ongoing California Indian dispossession is intimately linked to the development and expansion of the carceral settler state in northwestern California.