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Intervening in the Archive
Women-Water Alliances, Narrative Agency, and Reconstructing Indigenous Space in Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
The affirmation "California is a story. California is many stories" opens Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, in which Miranda pries California-both the story and the geography-from the hands of Franciscan missionaries and their settler-colonial successors (xi). Of the many stories that make up the geography now known as the state of California, narratives about water remain prevalent. This analysis pivots upon the voice of the Río Carmelo, whose agency is channeled through Miranda and the Indigenous women she relies on for their long-standing relationships with the water. It embraces Waziyatawin's assertion that "complete decolonization is a necessary end goal in a peaceful and just society," and it requires us to "rethink our ways of being and interacting in this world to create a sustainable, healthy, and peaceful co-existence with one another and with the natural world" (13, emphasis added). Furthermore, if we apply Doreen Massey's conceptualization of space to Miranda's Río Carmelo context by accepting that space is (1) "the product of interrelations," (2) "constituted through interactions . . . in which distinct trajectories coexist," and (3) "always in the process of being made," then narratives that detail long-standing interrelationships between Indigenous Californians and their ancestral lands have the power to reaffirm the Río Carmelo as Indigenous space (9). In my analysis of this multigenre text, I examine how Bad Indians intervenes in the archival plethora of narratives used to justify settler-colonial land claims in order to "[overturn] the institutions, systems, and ideologies of colonialism that continue to affect every aspect of Indigenous life" (Waziyatawin 13). In short, I argue that Bad Indians uses the archive-built out of exploitative settler-colonial research methodologies-against itself in an effort to restore Indigenous rights to the Río Carmelo.
While Bad Indians is labeled a memoir, its subtitle defies generic classifications by expanding the scope of the text beyond the individual to include tribal relationships. By its namesake, a tribal memoir must be polyvocal. As a tribal memoir, Miranda's text also functions as a "tribalography," according to Choctaw scholar LeAnne Howe's definition of such as a "rhetorical space" in which "Native people created narratives that were histories and...