American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.