American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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.