Content area
Full Text
Tell the lies now and maybe later
your descendants will dig
for the truth in libraries,
field notes, museums,
wax cylinder recordings,
newspaper reports of massacres
and relocations, clues you left behind
when you forgot
to lie
lie lie lie.
-Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
In the poem "Lies My Ancestors Told for Me," Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen and Chumash) evokes the colonial archive, the collection of historical documents and materials that informs her 2013 memoir, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, of which this poem is part. Significantly, Miranda suggests here that "truth" can be found in institutional archives, among the "lies" told in the interest of survival: "and when you tell that lie / tell it in Spanish," "Give your children / Spanish names," "Don't tell them / you still speak Chumash / with their mother" (40). Throughout this complex memoir, Miranda demonstrates the need to look to many sources-and to read them critically-to find these "clues" that help her reconstruct her story of self and the story of her people, a story of genocide at the hands of the Spanish missionaries and later those of the United States.1 "Constructing this book has been hard," she writes in the book's introduction, "listening to those stories seep out old government documents, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) forms, field notes, the diaries of explorers and priests, the occasional writings or testimony from Indians, family stories, photographs, newspaper articles" (xx).2 But Miranda tells a different story, one that she centers around the Esselen word xu-lin (meaning to reclaim, return, recover),3 making her "tribal memoir" simultaneously an act of discovery and recovery, a testimony, a tribal genealogy, a reclamation, and a historical reconstruction.4 The memoir also functions as a quest to find her ancestors' voices in the archives-those telling the "lies" in the poem cited above.5 Miranda is not the first Indigenous author to go to the archives to reconstruct and write the history of her people, but what makes this text unique and compelling is how she calls attention to and interprets the colonial record and how she positions Indigenous archives and knowledge.
In this book, Miranda not only reclaims or recovers archival materials, but she also demonstrates how to read them, how to translate...