Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

“California is a story.”

The opening sentence of the book’s Introduction establishes both the setting and one of the major themes. Miranda believes that stories often outlive other forms of evidence, including writings and material culture. Stories, therefore, constitute our strongest link to the past.

“In other words, the Mission Unit is all too often a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny rather than actually educational or a jumping off point for critical thinking or accurate history.”

The “Mission Unit” refers to part of California’s educational curriculum that requires fourth-graders to complete a mission-related project. This often involves nine- and 10-year-olds working on mission-themed coloring books or putting together easy-to-assemble replica missions purchased from one of California’s mission gift shops. Miranda denounces the “Mission Unit” as the equivalent of asking elementary-school students to complete slavery- or Holocaust-related projects in which those ugly histories are equally sanitized.

“The bottom line is that individual missions were successful only for the missionaries, who spent their lives secure in the belief that they served their Supreme Deity faithfully and had done no wrong.”

This line appears in the “Mission” entry of “My Mission Glossary,” a section Miranda calls “excerpts from a very late fourth grade project” (6). In both the “Mission” entry and the glossary section as a whole, Miranda often uses dark and subversive sarcasm, such as describing the mission as a “Massive Conversion Factory” that relied on a “fresh supply of human beings” for the “production of converts” (16). Miranda mixes these sarcastic comments, however, with serious assessments like this quotation. Furthermore, all such references to missionaries are reminders that much of the surviving mission-related evidence, which Miranda uses throughout her book, comes from missionary sources.