American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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This introduction describes the context of the event the special issue reflects, the turn/return of California Indian studies that Bad Indians incites, the themes of the issue, and the contributions of the authors.

This article is based on the “California Indian Studies and the Archive” panel from the Bad Indians Symposium which celebrated the 10th anniversary of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. After a decade, Miranda’s engagement with the archive is still palpable and inspired a panel of three historians to discuss how California Indian scholars navigate the archive. Especially as these are often repositories that were not created by Native people or with them in mind. Nonetheless, Native people have made the archive their own. This article argues for a California Indian methodology to interrogate, learn from and disrupt the archive. 

This essay explores Deborah Miranda's use of archival sources for her book Bad Indians. In it, I address three points: the varied sources Miranda uses, how Miranda uses what Saidiya Hartman call critical fabulation to work with these materials, and how her work shows us that we should always use an "always assumed" approach to absences in the archive, we should always assume the presence of indigenous people even when the colonial archive omits these presences.

This is the keynote delivered by Deborah Miranda at the CISSA symposium. Beginning with a set of questions she has received since writing Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Miranda reflects on the life of the book as well as the material circumstances of its writing through the image of a tsunami. Thinking about the damage, the survivors and debris, and the lasting effects of histories of catastrophe and violence, Miranda asserts that Bad Indians is a reflection on how to ride the tsunami. It is a book of transformation, of trying to catch the wave of change in all its difficulty.  

The only way California Indians can move beyond destructive narratives is to share retellings of the past that center our ancestors and who we are as a people. In Bad Indians, Esselen scholar and poet Deborah Miranda discusses C. C. Pierce’s famous 1893 photograph “Ancient Belles of San Luis Rey” and asks a series of questions about the three elderly Luiseño women pictured. Following Bad Indians’ call for California Indians to share our stories, this piece answers Miranda’s questions, acknowledging the challenges that exist in giving voice to silenced histories, and offers a Luiseño-centered reconstruction of the photographed women’s lives.

This is an excerpted section from Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. It retells a story told by Isabel Meadows about an Esselen woman who, in complicity with a river, cursed the white man who stole her people's land and removed them. 

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. 

This is a reflection on grief and Miranda's Bad Indians. It includes a poem written to welcome Maori visitors to California.

Deborah A. Miranda’s experimental meditation Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, first published in 2012, is a carefully woven narrative collage of the intergenerational trauma of genocide that conjures forth a time and space beyond the settler fiction of California where Indigenous peoples heal and regenerate worlds. I argue that Miranda’s Bad Indians is a queer Indigenous feminist poetic against the grammar of genocide. Bad Indian poetics are a way of being and moving beyond settler fictions towards the possibility of other worlds. The Bad Indian is both a queer relation creating non-heteropatriarchal genealogies and an articulation of Indigenous felt theory that exceeds the legibility of the human and Western affect and ways of knowing. The pedagogy of Miranda’s Bad Indian is significantly more expansive than simply a counter-narrative to settler origin fantasies, public landmark histories, or problematic grade school curriculums - it is a way of learning, feeling, and knowing to navigate, heal, and regenerate from colonialism. The Bad Indian creates the poetry of bringing otherwise worlds into being, lives in non-linear sacred time and intergenerational memory, and feels differently, queerly Indigenous. The Bad Indian as poetic and pedagogy emerges from non-federally recognized tribal descendant experiences, queering methodologies for Indigenous regeneration that defy ways we have internalized colonial borders and definitions of Indigeneity and opens space for stories that do not conform to even the mainstream narratives of Indian Country itself. This essay works through that methodology: using a mosaic of graphics, stories, and archival fragments; to demonstrate how Bad Indians allows us to create knowledge and critique differently and abolish the false borders between the critical and creative. 

This is an excerpt from the play Iya: The Ex'celen Remember. It retells the Esselen creation story.

In the chapter “To Make Story Again in the World,” Deborah Miranda speaks to the ways our California Indian stories "aren’t easy, they are fractured” (p. 193). In Bad Indians, Miranda  shares ways “to make them whole,” an extremely demanding task, one which is contemporary California Indian scholarship. We are directed to a “multilayered web of community reaching back in time and forward in dream, questing deeply into the country of unknown memory” (p. 194); to “look at more than one interpretation simultaneously, … at both the blessing and the genocide” (p. 196); to search out stories that still exist “like underground rivers” that run alive and are singing nonetheless, and call us back (p. 203); and to listen deeply to our bodies, which “like compasses, still know the way” (p. 208). Taking cues from Miranda, this “experiential story” (Archibald, 2008, p. 85) honors this author’s ontological lens and tribal epistemology as a Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo person. The piece integrates koya-’aklanna  (paintings/art), storytelling, and Native languages, as the author is “culturally ready” (Kovach, 2021) at this moment. This story is part of a curriculum about the ethics of locating one’s positionality in a context of colonial amnesia, cultural genocide, and linguicide at a predominately White institution. The intention of this publication is to respectfully share story as living relationship in the discourse on Indigenous methodology and culturally sustaining approaches to research and pedagogy. This research story, as a multilayering of koya-’aklanna1 (paintings/art), dreams, embodied knowing, and Native languages, is a quest to be in relation with many relationships simultaneously; to make whole. 

This essay reads the poetry in Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians as a form of re-storying, a way of retelling stories and reclaiming the historical memory of those stories without abandoning their subjectivities, and without falling into the constraint of rules of determine stories must have a particular ‘structure’; must be ‘accurate and unchanged’; and must always,  retellings, represent some sense of ‘truth’. This essay opens with and is primarily composed of close readings of three poems, which include: "Los Pájaros," "Lies My Ancestors Told for Me," and "Ishi at Large.” The decision to structure the essay in this manner is meant to underscore how poetry provides the historical and cultural lens for understanding California Indians history, and for recognizing how California Indian ways of being impact how we read poetry simultaneously. In doing so, this essay illustrates how Miranda's writing refuses to settle with making counter-narratives to colonial logics but is further entwined with the difficult task of bringing certain omissions, clues, lies, shards, into the light and reaffirming their relationality to one another.

Cj Jackson

This is a book review of The Community Based PhD: Complexities and Triumphs of Conducting CBPR, edited by Sonya Atalay and Alexandra C. McCleary.

No reader can walk away from Chadwick Allen’s (Chickasaw descent) Earthworks Rising without new insights into how Native experiences influence contemporary Indigenous literature. The book examines relationships between monumental earthworks and Native creative expression. Earthworks are not simply archaeological relics of the past, but nodes within expansive indigenous networks that link the past to the present and future. Armed with numerous examples of analog and digital visual arts, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, performance, and even texts from museum exhibits, Allen confronts the longstanding history of settler engagements with North America’s “mounds” from a fresh perspective that ideologically liberates the earthworks as a site of creation and Native futurity.

Until now, almost all literature available on “mounds” has been from an archaeological perspective. The introduction approaches this backstory as a given, providing readers a curt overview of 19th-century Euro-American fascination with the mounds.

 The introduction quickly moves from the often-cited works of the settler imaginary to less well-known Indigenous ontologies, preparing the reader for the depth of what is to come. The bulk of the book is divided into three parts each with a coda, followed by an overall conclusion. Each part of the book’s triptych focuses on different facets of Indigenous cosmology including sky above, water, earth, and the subterranean cardinal directions.

Allen introduces readers to a breadth of contemporary literature about monumental earthworks sprawling across what is now the Midwestern, Southeastern, and interior Eastern United States. Most of the earthworks discussed were created by Indigenous ancestors from approximately 800-1500 CE. They  are known variously as sites or cities within the “Mississippian” culture, kingdoms, or civilization and linked with intensive corn (maize) agriculture. Cahokia is one of the best-known of these sites. Rising above the banks of the Mississippi River, opposite present-day St. Louis Missouri, Cahokia was an ancient city of fifteen thousand or more people. “Monks Mound,” the largest platform- mound complex towers some 30 meters high over the grassy and sparsely wooded landscape surrounding it.  Other earthwork-city complexes discussed are much older and defy anthropologists' preconceived ideas regarding earthworks. For example, Poverty Point was constructed prior to maize agriculture. The book advances theory for the field of Indigenous Studies by exposing readers to various cosmologies and in utilizing 21st century methods, like Dan Million’s intense dreaming.  

                Earthworks Rising is a kind of archeology of selected sites of literature, visual art, and popular images. The center of the book contains twenty color plates richly illustrating Serpent Mound from above to scenes from John Egan’s ca. 1850 panoramas to the book cover of Hedge Coke’s Blood Run and Alyssa Hinton’s mixed media works.  In addition,l half-tone photographs are contained throughout the book. Allen’s focus is primarily on poetry, performance, contemporary nonfiction and museology, but the book does not pretend to be exhaustive. Instead, Allen offers representative examples taken from both personal knowledge and research. The experiential portion extends from his own encounter “Walking the Mounds” (Chapter 3) to the lived awareness of those he features. In this way, the book offers several vignettes and snapshots of important literary and artistic works. In the fifth chapter, “Secured Vaults,” we are introduced to Phillip Carroll Morgan’s Anompolichi: the Word Master and its sequel. Morgan’s work features Cahokia not as a stand-alone monument, but a large and vibrant city within a deeply interconnected continent, in contrast to the “arid scenarios of Ancient America offered by archeologists…” (188). Through a roundabout way, readers learn an alternate perspective on Nanih Waiya (“leaning mound”), the Choctaw ishki chito (great mother) mound, and nearby natural hill with cave. Most translate it to leaning mound, but Allen, drawing on Ian Skrodin’s fictional work, posits that only the homonymous Nanih Waya (“fruitful hill”) –like a swollen belly and navel—makes cosmological sense.

Readers are introduced to how museums and Native Nations’ newly embrace monumental earthworks, a phenomenon that has been growing since the 1970s. For example, Allen’s explanation of the Chickasaw Cultural Center’s sky bridge and reconstructed platform mound built in 2010 mirrors his discussion of Anompa  (language) used to describe the mounds historically.  Additionally, the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, which opened in 2021, is curvilinear. Its design is circular and consciously breathes the deep cultural connections regarding seasons, cycle of life, and the ancestral mounds that did the same. In this way, it is more than a simulacra: it is a contemporary earthwork rising above the banks of the Oklahoma River across from downtown and visible from all of the major highways that crisscross the city. The book captures a  stunning color photograph of the winter solstice sunset aligning with a tunnel at the Cultural Center (Plate 19).

While the main focus of the monograph is earthworks, Allen also touches on a number of important, sometimes controversial, and often unexamined topics. Jimmy Durham, now widely derided as a “pretendian” (ethnic fraud) is featured, despite being widely-known as a “Pretendian.” Allen’s refreshingly frank self-reflexive  narrative–including his prior collaborations with Durham– plays a major part in Chapter 2.  Revisiting Alice Walker’s imagined burial mound in Meridian, Allen notes the turn toward an Afro-Indigenous reading of blood, land and memory in the South, but expands the scope to a view from the perspective of mounds. Sometimes discussion of the monumental earthworks turns to legend and lore that evokes fear, concern, and trepidation. These lesser-known cautionary tales about ancient hierarchical (and often evil)  earthworks builders continue to circulate in some Native communities; Allen also offers readers a window into those worlds.  

The book is a page-turner, despite its heft. It effortlessly weaves lived experience, theory and poetry into the kind of book that with each read, a new layer is revealed. Academics and students of American Indian and Indigenous Studies, anyone interested in themes of cultural heritage, and those already captivated by monumental earthworks will all want to read this book. But it should also appeal to landscape architects, philosophers, and younger Native activists focused on #LandBack, rematriation, and reclaiming elements of shared patrimony, including those active in the creation of new earthworks and new Indigenous land art. It dialogues well with recent comparative and transnational studies like Tim Pauketat’s Gods of Thunder (2023). The book also serves as a great companion to recent projects such as Nanih Bvlbancha in New Orleans and Jeffrey Gibson’s monumental sculpture “Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House.” In this light, the book offers a wider conceptual framework for both Native and non-Native peoples to understand these modes of resurgence.

Robert B. Caldwell Jr

Department of Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

Reviewed by Yifei Jing, Peking University

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Reviewed by Marissa Carmi

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Book Review by Anne Flaherty

Natasha Myhal

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