stories, surviving, and what a poem can do? in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians

This essay reads the poetry in Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians as a form of re-storying, a way of retelling stories and reclaiming the historical memory of those stories without abandoning their subjectivities, and without falling into the constraint of rules of determine stories must have a particular ‘structure’; must be ‘accurate and unchanged’; and must always, retellings, represent some sense of ‘truth’. This essay opens with and is primarily composed of close readings of three poems, which include: "Los Pájaros," "Lies My Ancestors Told for Me," and "Ishi at Large.” The decision to structure the essay in this manner is meant to underscore how poetry provides the historical and cultural lens for understanding California Indians history, and for recognizing how California Indian ways of being impact how we read poetry simultaneously. In doing so, this essay illustrates how Miranda's writing refuses to settle with making counter-narratives to colonial logics but is further entwined with the difficult task of bringing certain omissions, clues, lies, shards, into the light and reaffirming their relationality to one another.