Bad Indians and the Destruction of Writing

The Difficulty and the Difference: Having Bad Feelings in Common

What constitutes the destruction of California Indians is not only the massacres but everything that leads up to, surrounds, and comes after, including state-oriented, institutional forms of redress and reconciliation. The massacres were a frenzied bloodlust, made clear by the descriptions of butchery of the young, old, and everyone in between; instrumental but also vicious and cruel; spectacular in the ways that human rights and historical discourses revel in. The traffic in body parts, bounties, militias and Indian hunting parties, the sheer brutality of actions and language, evince this murderous desire, splayed out conspicuously in the archive and historians’ narratives. But the military and juridical executions, forbidding of testimony, legalized abductions, criminalization of freedom, rendering homeless of large swaths of people, forced marches, confinement and starvation, rape and enslavement, removal of children for their own good to government schools and to white families, coercion to pray to the wrong god, forbidding of language and ceremony, intentional decimation of Native food sources and relations with other beings, flooding of village and sacred sites, and then forgetting it all happened testify to a will to annihilate completely. Can one wonder, then, at these sorts of descriptions? From the Tuolomne Courier, 1858:

For months past our feelings have been shocked at the condition of the Indians who are located about this neighborhood. There is no sympathizing care extended to these frail relics of humanity, as the storms sweep over their miserable huts and unclad bodies. Their intercourse with civilized communities has been accompanied with the ordinary results which other tribes have experienced under similar circumstances: prostitution, intemperance, and vice, in their most revolting aspects. As soon as the grey light of morning appears, they may be seen prowling round in search of miserable offal, for which they must compete with the dogs. At midnight their savage howls may frequently be heard, as they return to their sleeping places, half crazy from the poisonous drink which they have imbibed from some of the low grogeries about the outskirts of town. A few weeks ago, one of their number murdered another in the vicinity of the Catholic Church, while raving with madness from the above cause. But there is no law enforced for these poor wretches. It is no one’s business to look after and protect them. Why do not our citizens ask the Legislature to have them removed to one of the reservations, where they will be comfortable, and be afforded an opportunity of learning some of the Christian ways of civilized being.1

Here we see the stirrings of, the early conditions and moral sentiments for, reconciliation. All the usual western humanist trappings are here: paternalism; civilizationist white supremacy; calls for law and order, for temperance leading to criminalization, for separation and confinement; isolation of a single violent event in the midst of an unacknowledged genocidal context; mind-numbing ignorance and myopia regarding complicity; liberal outrage and shock and the affected expressed desire to save. Yet, in relation to other accounts in the media and documents from this time, this response is progressive compared to the typical calls for extermination. This writer was a good person. But that, of course, is the rub. What the writer wants are “good” Indians that mirror the writer’s own “goodness”—just living elsewhere. A future for all. We know what storm sweeps over them.

Sara Ahmed has described the “happiness script,” which defines colonial social norms, such as those in the above quote, as social goods to be desired, along with the abjection of anyone who refuses such “gifts.”2 For Ahmed, this form of hegemony seeks to secure the willing participation of the subjected through the language of emotion and the promise of the social: they will be comfortable, and be afforded an opportunity of learning some of the Christian ways of civilized being. This script, of course, fails to recognize any other form of sociality that lies outside of such norms and operates by determining in advance the future unhappiness of those who remain outside of it. The problem in the description above and in other colonial contexts is that the “unhappiness” (and here we quickly reach the limits of the term) with the colonial world experienced by Indigenous people is also a refusal of a world that interprets Indigeneity as an inherent source of badness and negative feelings, as if Indigenous people were not perfectly content before colonizers arrived. The plethora of accusations that Indigenous peoples are too emotional, too embodied, throughout the colonial archive, indicate this interpretive double bind; part of colonial public discourse, they also call for an account of colonial affect and of how bad feelings in such scenes authorize, exclude, and otherwise discipline Indigenous responses to violence. This scene, described by the “well-intentioned” colonizer, is not one of a simple absence of goodness and happiness in a miserable people but of a people fundamentally affected by colonial violence where the promise of happiness, goodness, and futurity, according to the colonizer’s standards, is itself a continuation of the problem.

But look at the scene again and one begins to see the outline of a different sociality at odds with the writer’s vision, one formed along the edge of destitution, the brink of despair. A “crazy” sociality, drunk, fighting, fucking, scavenging, outside the law on the edge of the respectable town, at the low grogeries. Uncomfortable, uncivilized, without fellowship, competing with the dogs, both ordinary and revolting, it seethes, bubbles over the edge. How far into the abyss does it push? It is a sociality formed in the crucible of survival, one antithetical to “the social” as conceived by western humanists. Further, the scene isn’t an isolated snapshot but a feeling in common that other tribes have experienced. Take note of this event as described in the San Joaquin Republican, also in 1858: “The Fresno Indians . . . are killing their doctors or medicine-men. They declare them to be witches, that they cannot cure the sick, and that there will be no more rain or green grass until they are exterminated. Seven or eight of their doctors have in consequence already suffered martyrdom.”3 What would compel a people to kill their connection to the spiritual world and to other beings, to kill their holders of knowledge and health? The same thing that compelled people to refuse white reproductive futurity by calling for the deaths of all mixed-race children as a way to bring back the dead and make the whites disappear.4 The same thing that compelled people to hand over members of their communities when the Spanish priests and conquistadors cracked down on the Joyas, California Indian third-gendered people.5 Caused them to make terrible, unforgivable decisions in the face of it: despair.

This chapter is interested in the infrathin distance between—the proximity or imbrication of—despair and emancipation, despair as a fraught emancipation from the demand to be good, as an anticolonial orientation that works itself out through writing. Despair is lived impossibility, a death that exceeds or survives dying. Fundamentally, arriving with the radical destruction of Indigenous worlds, despair is an interruption of temporality, a desperate sense of diminishing future.

Reading Zabel Essayan’s description of Armenian survivors of the catastrophe at the hands of the Turkish state gathered in a church in 1911, Marc Nichanian points to the ways the catastrophe turns affective and world-breaking: “with everyone there is discouragement, an extreme despair, they respond with bitter irony to our words of encouragement . . . Anxious and driven mad, they were unwilling to hear any word of consolation. Each person forgot his or her own pain and grief, it was an invincible and collective crowd whose emotions turned at times even against us.”6 Despair produces an unimaginable and unintelligible relation to the world: “This bloodbath, this stream of spilled blood, this despair of a humanity driven mad, caught between fire and blade, all this remained beyond my imagination, and I believe this was the case for everyone involved.”7 Marc Nichanian notes how Essayan expresses a complicated desire to put herself in the place of those who suffered along with an impossibility to do so, creating an aporia of the imagination that she seeks to write (through). Separated by despair, interrupted at the level of imagination, writing here becomes a form of disidentification that, nonetheless, is also general in the assembled group, unmooring the survivors from sense, producing a senseless, invincible collectivity. For Nichanian, this problem for writing is a sign of the interdiction on mourning, of the impossibility of death, which has the effect of bringing literature itself to a halt, replacing the literary imagination, which he associates with mourning, with an archival impetus, a tyranny of the archive to document what happened as the working out of the interdiction. The interruption of the literary imagination and the archival demand for truth together indicate a type of writing founded on destruction and in the throes of despair. From such senselessness derives the demand to make sense of it. The desire to know the sum of what happened, both in terms of the depth of a single experience and the range of experiences, is impossible. For Nichanian, the demand and the impossibility are together the outcome of a genocidal will that places on the survivors the burden of making sense of the violence according to the terms of the executioner. It raises the questions of perception and position through such disidentification and an interrupted and reframed commonality.

Elaborating on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick has argued that this aporia—described by Nichanian in the realms of literature and representation—can also be found within archival and scientific metrics that remain forever approximate, plural in their sources and meanings, allowing one to “doubt knowable data and a singular analytic frame.”8 This unknowingness is accumulative and relational, testing the limits of the imagination with too many kinds of death, both past and present, to list and grieve. “It is through conceptualizing weights and measurements as relational to and distinguished from Black Life the promise of the slave ship emerges.”9 Organized around the logistics of the Atlantic slave trade and, in particular, the infamous court case involving the slave ship Zong, McKittrick’s argument indicates how the various forms of common measure, such as the ledger system, can be read in more complex ways than as forms of dehumanization. These measures exist as “analytical pathways that are beholden to a system of knowledge that descriptively rehearses antiblackness and . . . necessarily refuses decolonial thinking,” which, for McKittrick, raises the question of how to engage mathematical and numerical certainties without reprising the violence.10 For McKittrick, the question isn’t about how to get over the brutality but rather how to live with it differently, an imperative that causes her to “move with the numbers” and work out how the discomfort with the “mathematics of Black Life can inform current and future formations of Black Studies.”11 A process of simultaneously noticing, reworking, and mistrusting the archival display of the mutilated body, this alternative hears in the numbers the counting of the whip, to “trust the lie” (“born free”) and counts it out differently, because, “as we all know, numbers signify measurable items, but they also invite chaos.”12

McKittrick references a totalizing maritime metric, deadweight tonnage, which measures the entirety of a ship’s weight, “all provisions, crew, fuel, cargo, and so forth,” a singular measurement that “erases humanness just as it enacts it” in its very inhumanity. This measurement is a singularity that unfolds infinitely in the face of the complexity of relations and bears unbearably on the unknown dead thrown overboard the ship, translated and made legible as insured loss of cargo.13 Like Essayan’s frustrated desire to record all suffering, I was unable—despite superhuman efforts—to grasp the totality of their misfortune, and still today I cannot, loss here is unimaginable as a totality and yet somehow, terribly, quantifiable, the sum of suffering translated into deadweight tonnage.14 Accounting for loss runs into the dilemma of quantitative or qualitative feelings through the problem of an untranslatable intensity and an unknowable past. Representing numbers beyond sense, this measure makes suffering knowable otherwise, as infinite summation of the death that survives dying and gets recast somehow, somewhat mysteriously, as life. As Dian Million notes, “any official way that . . . knowledge is argued into being is not immune any more to the effects of a radically multiplied field of enunciation.”15

Together, the sociality founded on despair—that renders literature and mourning impossible, as seen in the “invincible” assemblage of Armenian survivors collectivized by “the feeling of having been trampled collectively, of having been crushed by savage claws”—and the sociality of deadweight tonnage—founded on the infinite undecidability between human and inhuman measure—indicate something about destruction and despair and the limits they place on the social and what sociality looks like across such limits.16 Despair. Pushed further according to the more-than-just-killing that constitutes ongoing destruction and the inhuman relationality of deadweight tonnage, despair is not only inhuman (outside of human control), like all emotions, but also not just human, competing with dogs searching for miserable offal. Despair is humanization as terror, reorganizing relational being into a humanized order that trickles down into scraps to be fought over. I am not providing a psychosocial diagnosis (which implies need of a cure) but an attempt to try to understand the political import of this bad feeling, of being on the receiving end of such a humanizing system, including the impossible recuperation of a bad feeling into a political project; to stay with this feeling despite its ugliness or one’s own discomfort.17 Just because despair cannot be recuperated doesn’t mean it is without use. This claim is certainly not a prescription, though. In staying with the difficulty of an impossible politics of despair, one ends up perhaps finding a collective orientation. As Jean-François Lyotard notes, “A single referent—say a phenomenon grasped in the field of human history—can be used qua example, to present the object of the discourse of despair, but also qua bit of guiding thread, to present analogically the object of the discourse of emancipation.”18

In California, genocide socialities sprang up in spaces overrun with despair, what Michael Taussig in another context calls “spaces of death”19: the forts where abducted women and children were taken and auctioned into slavery; the missions, including the monjería where women were kept and isolated from the men often for the purposes of sexual exploitation; the boarding schools, also segregated by gender for the same purpose; the rez; the places of contact between women sexually enslaved by white men in “marriage” or “concubinage.” People gathered together in these spaces: mixed bands of raiders hiding out in the hills, refugees of mass slaughter congregating in the woods, as well as the difficult socialities between California Indians and other abjected groups in nineteenth-century California: Chinese, Mexicans, Hawaiians, enslaved Black people brought to the gold mines by Southern owners escaping the Civil War, and “errant” whites. They are also tied to the radical rupture made in Indigenous socialities with other-than-human beings, an effect of an imposed imperial epistemology that weds capitalist production with secularized theology, creating an ontological hierarchy of terror based on human mastery.20 As a fundamental part of “the construction of colonial reality . . . these spaces of death blend as common pool signifiers or caption points binding the culture of the conqueror with that of the conquered. The space of death is preeminently a space of transformation.”21 They are also difficult spaces of survival and socialization under extreme duress.

For Taussig, speaking about torture as employed by the Colombian military dictatorship against Indigenous people, that legacy of violence extends directly from the general colonial terrorism employed against Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans by “an initially far smaller number of [white] Christians.”22 The resources for understanding it, though, flow from Indigenous epistemes and healing practices and the familiarity of Indigenous healers with the space of death. As an “elderly Ingano Indian from the Putumayo” says:

With the fever I was aware of everything. But after eight days I became unconscious. I know not where I was. Like a madman I wandered, consumed by fever. They had to cover me up where I fell, mouth down. Thus after eight days I was aware of nothing. I was unconscious. Of what people were saying, I remembered nothing. Of the pain of the fever, I remembered nothing; only the space of death—walking in the space of death. Thus, after the noises that spoke, I remained unconscious. Now the world remained behind. Now the world was removed. Well, then I understood. Now the pains were speaking. I knew that I would live no longer. Now I was dead. My sight had gone. Of the world I knew nothing, nor the sound of my ears. Of speech, nothing. Silence. And one knows the space of death, there . . . And this death—the space that I saw, I was in its center, standing. Then I went to the heights. From the heights a star-point seemed my due. I was standing. Then I came down. There I was searching for the five continents of the world, to remain, to find me a place in the five continents of the world—in the space in which I was wandering. But I was not able.23

How does one understand this space of death, mediated as it is by the telling of an anthropologist investigating the role of Indigenous healers in colonized spaces of terror? Couched in a story of shamanic vision, a form of experience so desperately sought by colonizers (including anthropologists and avant-garde artists of all stripes), the story/vision is difficult to unpack without contributing to the exoticization and romanticization of Indigenous knowledge and spiritual practices. Its social and historical contexts, specifically in relation to Indigeneity, are essential, and yet this story is about the world’s absence, of an absolute disidentification and untethering from earthly coordinates. As Taussig, in another text, explains, context is not “a secure epistemic nest in which our knowledge-eggs are to be safely hatched” but must include the spatially and temporally disorienting juxtapositions and mediations that flow from the destruction, as well as the points of disjuncture and incommensurability.24 Disorientation, including that caused by or causing of despair, is the context. Asserting this position is meant to avoid the trap of employing empirical social and historical descriptions and explanations to enact mastery over both society and history, as well as over our own discourses, according to an expanded western rationality. Such scholarly contextualization is still very much about white, western control, often participating in what anticolonial scholar Dylan Rodríguez calls “white reconstruction,” or the reformation of white supremacy along more progressive lines.25 A complete disorientation, the Indigenous healer’s story, rather, encapsulates much of the general disorientation caused by colonization and the destruction of Indigenous worlds, described variously as the world ending, turning over, or having come unstuck. The healer’s story precisely indicates the experiences of Indigenous people caught up in the spaces of death and socialities of despair.

The complex array of genocide socialities formed in such a disorientation—what I will refer to from here on out as (anti)socialities to mark the ineradicable violence inscribed into their hearts—participate in Dian Million’s notion of felt theory in profoundly unsettling ways. This array makes it necessary, in other words, that these genocide socialities become a part of what Stephen Best calls “a collective undoing” through having disaffiliative bad feelings in common.26 Because, for Million, Indigenous stories are “emotionally empowered,” they are “informed with the affective content of the colonial experience,” a felt experience that often renders Indigenous stories unrecognizable as theory to western scholarship, relegated to the realm of the personal or traumatic, with its implied justifications for state and institutional interventions and undergirding commitment to humanistic mastery. Indigenous stories, reflective of difficult socialities, don’t fit the objectivizing descriptions of Indigenous thought in the cultural narrative, and they don’t fit the acceptable social and historical narratives that register colonial violence as knowledge of what happened along with its sociologically determined effects. As a mode of collective, if fraught, theorizing derived from social experience and communicated as story and relation, for Million such theorizing takes the material forms of poetry, memoir, documentary, and, especially, testimony, which are sources for on-the-ground anticolonial theorizing by our ancestors and kin, full of the pain and suffering that incites thought. In the epigraph to this chapter, she relates such theorizing to a common voice, a commonality that can’t be anything but a disintegration of individual experience into a common suffering, a commonality that is also a commonness as common disidentification through the antigravity of despair. It is, as she says, a radically multiplied field of enunciation.

Million, however, cautions against the desire to seek in these expressive forms of difficult, collective (anti)sociality a recuperative impulse, a too-easy representation of resistance that would merely be a salve for our own bad feelings, an impulse that she locates in a biopolitics that can infuse affect, healing, testimony, and community with power aligned with the neoliberal and reconciliatory forces of the settler state.27 Million’s caution extends to the hegemonic form of representing the destruction of California Indians through the term genocide, a term with legal and institutional as well as communal and affective meanings. As seen in the previous chapter, attention to the discourse of genocide and its limits, to history and law (which are its primary productive forces), reveals what Nichanian calls the destitution of the fact, the replacement of the fact with proofs, arguments, evidence—in a word, the archive.28 Such a notion distorts our readings of and engagements with Million’s materialized common voice and raises the question McKittrick asks about how to live with the violence and its material traces. Especially in the current conjuncture, after a state executive order officially recognized genocide in California (though the term is absent from the text, Governor Newsom said “genocide” at a ceremonial apology to Native communities) and in the midst of a Truth and Healing Council’s investigations, it is important to try to understand how the tension between a politics of despair and the destitution of the fact (which underlies these developments and is said to provide hope, salve, futurity) interact in the multiplied field of collective voice and bad feelings in common. What happens to the fact? How do the case study, the event (which is always of language), the referent (in the ruins of representation), the ongoing structures of violence, and the afterlives of the destruction relate to the fact, to truth and representation, and to collective voice? What kind of poetics is at work? And what other poetics are possible?

Such questions cannot be asked abstractly as they bear on the positioning of knowledge, writing, and reading as material and interrelational practices in the form of a collective, counterhegemonic perception. Epeli Hau‘ofa, in the context of emphasizing a consciousness of the ever-expanding world of Oceania to counteract ideologies of dependence and development, has called for such radical shifts in spatial and temporal perception to ground Indigenous studies.29 And, following David Lloyd in his call to expand Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s challenge to the hegemonic English curriculum in Kenya (to abolish English departments and replace the curriculum with Indigenous African orature) to other contexts, these questions must be framed in relation to a demand to center California Indian stories in California.30 What this demand looks like is of course open, but it would seemingly engage something like the paradox of centering a stubbornly “weak” or “minor” literature and other marginal or minor forms of writing, including in their destroyed, fragmentary, reduced, and absent forms. This demand would also involve engaging noncanonical and a-disciplinary writing, including marginalia, nonliterary and archival documents, minor or niche publications, and everything else that constitutes the expanded text. Beyond the deep oral traditions of Native peoples, this expansive writing would include complicated forms of collective voicing and action, such as the antisocialities described in this chapter and the various modes of interrelationality that indicate the absence of distinction between culture and politics and that rearrange social relationships with all kinds of beings. Most important, this challenge to hegemonic English entails a refusal of the English language, where refusal means everything disclosed without disclosing anything, that is, writing in English without choice, without commitment, and without ownership.

Esselen and Chumash poet, theorist, and author Deborah Miranda, in the chapter epigraph and in her body of work more generally, outlines the struggle with an absence of choice confronted by California Indian peoples at The End of the World, a struggle that calls on the greatest powers of agency in their most adulterated, inhuman forms. Working in these ruins of representation leads to a problematics of the voice, of how to hear the voice beyond the dilemma of representation and its overcoming. What is the voice in the wake of catastrophe? Of an antisocial sociality? Of a politics of despair? In the next section, I look closely at the poetics of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians in order to understand these questions. In particular, I discuss the lesbian intertextuality that produces poetic relations between Miranda and Konkow Maidu poet Janice Gould in their correspondence and cross-textual references. I also discuss the social and sexual forms of identification and disidentification in the text organized around stories of bad Indians, archival, personal, and beyond. Drawing on the work of Rei Terada, I argue that the text opens a type of “nonway,” an original disruption that forgoes the usual dialectic of impasse and transcendence. The nonway creates a poetics that puts into question distinctions between poetics and knowledge, art and truth, performed in Miranda’s reuse of archival documents, stories of ancestors, descriptions of violence, and the position of beginning at The End of the World. Miranda argues that the ancestors who braved the destructive production of an ethnographic image of the present in order to use anthropology as a recording device functioned through an aesthetic agency that, for her, takes the form of story as survival, of communal affective and embodied experiences that ground a discontinuous continuity, a lived disruption, communicated across space and time, assimilating destruction itself as part of California Indian perceptual traditions. In this way, centering California Indian writing (literature and history in this chapter) is a specific place-oriented affair of the various peoples, peoples caught up in multiple forms of antisociality due to the conditions of violence in its multiple forms in this place.

This chapter, then, attends to the gray horizon of what can summarily be called writing destruction and its fraught poetics, as part of thinking through what centering California Indian storying might look like. Although, as a problematic and practice, writing destruction has gone by many names in relation to irreducible contexts, and largely should remain nameless in its plurality,31 here, tentatively, the destruction of California Indians opens onto the problem of writing and story.32 Two questions related to this name orient our attention/intention: Was Destruction a genocide? and Does a California Indian literature exist?33 Both questions, when seen as requiring definitive answers with attendant methodologies, risk a certain hegemonic response and approach (in historiography and literary studies, respectively), contributing to the ongoing destruction, as well as a certain retrenchment in genocidal epistemology through disciplinary critical reformulation. And yet, in their difficulty if not impossibility—better yet, their exhaustion and stubborn endurance—they resonate with each other, mapping a certain a-disciplinary space of indetermination where writing can be said to begin or end, to have always been ongoing, to never get started and to have no destination to arrive at. In asking these questions (again and again) without presuming a definitive answer, through an unmethodical method, this chapter seeks to inhabit this fraught space of poetics in order to clear away conventional wisdom by following the precarious path of ancestors who lived and wrote the destruction as an open-ended question and by listening to the words of California Indian authors who continue to write this destruction, risking writing’s destructive capacity.34

Being a Bad Indian: On Lowering Your Value

“I need a song so terrible that the first note splinters like slate, spits shards out into the universe—yes, that’s the song I need, the right song to accompany your first steps along the Milky Way, song with serrated edges, burnt red rim slicing into the Pacific—”35 There’s an intertextual moment in Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians that functions as a methodology of reparative destruction. It arrives in a scene of uncomfortable affiliation, while she waits in the hospital for her estranged and elderly father, Al Miranda, to have a minor surgery. He is, as the memoir has made clear, both the vessel and product of gendered, colonial violence, has been an inconstant figure in the author’s life, bringing both joy and utter pain when he is present; Miranda’s father is a connection to her Ohlone and Chumash cultures and a frustrating and insecurity-rending disruption: “It is our father whose body is the source of the most precious part of our identity, and the most damning legacies of our history.”36 This scene, described in the final section of the book, titled “Home,” comes at the end of a journey of exploration, of archival research into colonial mission records and documentation by salvage ethnographers, into violent colonial and familial interruptions and relationships through the same sources. Beginning in the profound disorientation of “The End of the World: Missionization” (the first section), the journey moves across “Bridges: Post-Secularization”; follows a mysterious “Light from the Carissa Plains: Reinvention,” toward a forgotten creation story; and ends, of course, with “Home.” But this isn’t a story about an uncomplicated homecoming, just as the resonances between Miranda’s ancestors, whose words, stories, images, and lives fill the book, and her more autobiographical moments are not uncomplicated connections. These connections strain across the archival materials, the temporal, spatial, physical, and affective dislocations and violence. At issue is the question of what these connections mean, if they are possible, in the wake of The End of the World. There’s a sense of profound brokenness and loss here that disorients (from) the beginning.

In this context, Miranda references a series of letters sent between her and the late Konkow Maidu poet Janice Gould, confessing “I don’t have an enrollment number, I don’t have stories. All I have is my father’s face, my grandmother’s hair, these Chumash hands.”37 Taking recourse to the body, it will be to the body, not citizenship or recognizable cultural performance or identity, that Miranda turns over and over again throughout Bad Indians as the base materiality of survival and of Indigenous endurance: “If not of the land, or tribe, or language, or soul, then at least—oh God at least—survival of the body. For just a little while longer, survival.”38 The body, though, is fractured and compartmentalized, not unlike the remains of culture in their own fragmented embodiment or the remains of ancestors murdered and butchered for body part trophies, bounties, and scientific research.39 The body is the site of the reproduction of colonial violence as well as the terrible song that splinters and makes possible a reassembling of pieces. This reassembling, for Miranda, sometimes takes the form of distant relationships, having spent much of her life in Washington State raised by non-Native relatives, and of sisterhood at a distance. She writes, “I’m impatient too. In my backpack is an unread letter from a woman I recently met at a writing workshop. Living over one thousand miles apart now, we have a rich and voluminous friendship-by-mail. I am anxious to read her response to my last letter, but I don’t want to bring it out until I’m alone,” and “In my heart, I call her sister. A woman who looks like me, my brother, my son. Like my father. I’m thirty years old; she is the only other California Indian I have met.”40 Miranda documents an impoverishment of culture, of disaffiliation from family and community, tied explicitly to genocidal violence, and an emaciated identity, suddenly nourished by a stream of letters, read when she is alone.

The connection the friends make is through the impoverishment itself, a feeding on emaciation and disaffiliation. Gould writes:

Mama taught us as kids that we were Konkow Indians, and she was emphatic that we should not be ashamed of this. She could not provide us, however, with a cultural heritage, which had been unraveling in our family for at least two generations as a consequence of intermarriage and the colonial legacy. Understanding our cultural heritage was something we had to do for ourselves: studying the hidden (and overt) “otherness” of our own lives, and tracing our family’s being through ethnographic accounts, linguistic data, local histories, folklore, and whatever had not passed out of our relatives’ memories.41

This impoverishment produces a poetics that, while seemingly initiating an individual project of exploration—something we had to do for ourselves—strains the very boundaries of the self, as the reference to the “otherness” of our own lives and the repetition of colonial representational forms makes clear. This poetic impoverishment is manifested in Miranda’s Bad Indians as a self-described and seemingly paradoxical title or form, A Tribal Memoir. This is a memoir that spans the end of the world brought on by Spanish missionization to the text’s present in 2012, tracing Miranda’s ancestors to her federally unrecognized tribe, the Ohlone/Costanoan Esselen Nation, that, as Miranda documents, moves in and out of various states of presence, though always there.

Miranda details this sense of self-otherness in the poem “Correspondence” dedicated to Gould in her book Indian Cartography:

I spend the summer near water:

McKenzie River, Guemes Island, Birch Bay.

You spend the summer driving

From Albuquerque to Santa Fe, back again.

I try to teach my children how to swim.

You try to raise poetry in adolescents.

In the evening, crickets scatter

in the driftwood, sing me to sleep.

You write of mourning dove skies,

cicada’s hypnotic buzz.

Despite distance we are sisters

birthed from the same wound.

Half-breeds, we don’t know

our own names, or stories.

But we can recite the creation myth

of race, species, inferiority.

We can remember there are others

like us, unfound.

They have a certain darkness of face,

eyes, thought; they move silently

through dry desert towns

and down the long Pacific coast.

Maybe they are looking for us.

I’ll leave a small pile of feathers,

shells, and round black stones

as a sign that I came this way.

In your classroom you do the same

With students’ words, hearts,

Jagged-cut poems.42

Self-otherness, like the jagged-cut poem, is the condition for a sameness across difference, a likeness, a woman who looks like me, my brother, my son. My father. Again the body, a certain darkness that also qualifies thought and conditions the search for others like oneself, an ambivalent loneliness/desire. An affiliation founded on dis/affiliation from/with the violent father, an entire genealogy of violence, Gould is a sister to Miranda because she is the only other California Indian Miranda has met. As Elaine Marks writes, in her survey of lesbian intertextuality (in French literature), “The I/you opposition remains, but the other is now also familiar, familial—a sister, a friend” for the first time, birthed from the same wound.43

Moving beyond the pages of Bad Indians, the letters between Gould and Miranda open up not only an intertextual relationship through Miranda’s reference to them but also a conversation across poems that spans several books. In Earthquake Weather, Gould references the letters in her poem “Blood Sisters,” dedicated to Miranda.

I did not know how lonely I was

till we began to talk.

You told me of the Mission,

the Book of Names,

and the photos you discovered.

Each offered a remote clue

about your family,

Chumash ancestors,

things you thought permanently lost.

I told you about the Maidu song my mother sang

in a scale I could never learn,

and about the tree on an old dirt road

where the white men lynched my people.

In our separate childhoods, we each

read that Indians were stupid,

lived like swine or dogs.

Such ignorant lies!

The Chumash were flogged and tortured,

the Maidu stolen for slaves,

and later marched at gunpoint

to a distant reservation.

We glance at one another,

fall silent.

Americans do not know these things

nor do they want to know.

But each of us knows stories

we have never even whispered.44

Sisterhood is here one of being California Indian women in the wake of The End of the World, a difficult sameness (across time and space as will be seen) but also much more. It is a position of knowing—in a certain way—that connects questions of affiliation and identification immediately to the political (as opposed to politics proper). Founded on a not hidden but not entirely known feeling, a previously unacknowledged loneliness, the violent representations, the legacies of settler violence, and the stories never even whispered, communicated in a glance, in silence, condition such reparative knowing and complicated association. Loneliness in Gould’s poem couples with anxiety-mitigating shared stories of historical violence and disrupted and/or difficult connections to family, tribe, and culture. It is an aloneness that makes relationships of similitude possible, a form of autonomy as something we had to do for ourselves that finds in the self the resource of a barely legible self-otherness that prepares the way for a kind of problematic sociality bubbling below the surface of the lonely and divided self.

In loneliness is found a more profound solitude than the isolation of western and settler individualism. It is a loneliness conditioned by an exclusion that makes possible inclusion as an even greater exclusion and dismissal from everyday life. It is a feeling of profound incompleteness, a feeling that, in the end, expresses nothing, a nothingness that appears in the silent glances, in the meandering work of finding others like oneself, alike in feelings, in a shade of darkness. Loneliness is tied to a broken relationality that renders identity only ever a tentative and provisional moment of closure but which ultimately resists definition. It is and conditions a form of communication that operates through feelings.

Like Marks in relation to lesbian writing, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick locates a form of reparative knowing in gay, lesbian, and queer intertextuality, which she associates with the queer-identified practice of camp, especially, the excessive, plenitudinous nature of its being too much, which, according to her, offers resources for a depleted self. These surplus aspects of camp performance, for Sedgwick, include “the startling displays of excess erudition . . . the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternative historiographies; the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions of present with past, and popular with high culture.”45 Exuberant and unsettling, such intertextual and communal explorations of reparative practices, their displays of too much beauty, too much stylistic investment, are also sites of expression for unexplainable “upwellings of threat, contempt, and longing.”

Miranda and Gould’s intertextual relationship, while related to questions of cultural and racial identity, also resonates with their lesbian identifications in their respective texts as similarly a wellspring. A genocidal relation formed out of feelings of emaciation and loneliness, out of resonant painful family histories and relations, and, especially, out of the violence of the colonial cisheteropatriarchal system of control over their bodies and desires, Miranda and Gould’s conversation finds its abundance in these shared negative feelings as well as in the interrupted relations between land and bodies. The landmarks the speaker and interlocutor in Miranda’s “Correspondence” left as orienting devices—I’ll leave a small pile of feathers, / shells, and round black stones / as a sign that I came this way. / In your classroom you do the same / With students’ words, hearts, / Jagged-cut poems—mark paths to such abundance, ways of finding each other across the vast wasteland of colonial life and the ongoing aftermath of genocide in a masculine world, even at great distance.

Two poems, “Old Territory. New Maps” by Miranda and “Six Sonnets: Crossing the West” by Gould, map out coordinates of searching, finding, and encountering abundance in distance in recounting a road trip the two took together. In some ways connected to the lesbian literary trope of awakening, of an encounter between a more experienced woman and one less experienced (though, as the younger Miranda writes, “she kisses me: lips pursed, trembling, inexperienced for all her boasts”46), what Gould and Miranda seemingly chart is a postapocalyptic world traversed by two California Indian lesbians who bear the scars and complex desires forged by colonial violence into other Indigenous lands. In Miranda’s poetic accounting, bodies and land hold the tension of desire and distance.

I want my longing to miraculously

bring you through the barrier of your skin

into my blood so that I can possess you

entirely and yet be entirely possessed.

You say no, your face tight with pain, tears

burning your eyes, hands clenching the steering wheel.

I believe you. We drive hundreds of miles

across deserts sculpted by wind and story,

and I learn distance from my hand to your thigh,

your mouth to my mouth, the curve of a collar

along a warm, smooth neck.

You grin as if no one has ever seen you thus:

naked, savage, happy.

That is the beginning of yes.

Ghosts are everywhere.

We hear them singing on that mountain in Ute country,

the cries of your flute pleasuring old spirits.

Like those people whose land we cross,

we don’t live by lines drawn on paper.

Instead, we mark the waterfall of shy kisses,

a dry windy town where we exchange secrets in whispers,

the high cliff hollow that shelters us

on the edge of the Uinta forest.

Wildflowers bend beneath our bodies,

cup the trembling weight of touch.

We wander for awhile in a place vast enough

to contain all possibilities.47

The possession and dispossession of the self-other is found here in longing, in the desire to absorb a self-same blood that is at same time difference. The desire to be-one-with, which is resisted with a no, maps onto the strained sexual relation between the speaker and her desired other: touch and kiss are distance itself. A seduction occurs across that distance, with and through it. Some of the characteristics of lesbian intertextuality and literature that Marks notes are the insistence on physical manifestations of desire, a visceral awareness of the female body, and repetition.48 These literary figures un-map the female body from heteropatriarchal coordinates and remap through story and poetry an undomesticated body. In Miranda’s account of the trip, the liberation of the body is made possible by the movement across land without lines on paper, its vastness. New locations give bearings, the waterfall of shy kisses, / a dry windy town where we exchange secrets in whispers, charting a path to a temporary refuge: in both the journey and the poem. As Marks notes, “There, safe temporarily from male intrusion, they indulge in an activity more subversive than love-making: they communicate with each other in woman’s language.”49

Gould offers her own account of the trip that elaborates on the strained relation of desire.

Her hand on my thigh, my shoulder,

in my hair. She leans over to kiss my cheek.

We look at each other, smile. For miles

we travel this way, nearly silent, point

with eyes or chins at the circling hawk, the king-

fisher on the snag above the swollen

creek. One night I weep in her arms

as she cries, “Oh, oh, oh!” because I have touched

her scars lightly: throat, belly, breasts.

In that communion of lovers, thick sobs

break from me as I think of my love

back home, all that I have done

and cannot say. This is the first time

I have left her so completely, so alone.50

A transgression more than of infidelity, the speaker and the lover’s connection is through loneliness but of a different kind, through silences that swell with more than just meaning, that dissolve meaning itself. The distance of loneliness here is even greater within the intimacy of sameness, a weeping that alights on scars, scars shared. It is a communion of lovers that opens onto something more fundamental than fundament, through scars and weeping, through an Indigenous lesbian encounter with the land outside of colonial heteropatriarchal control.

Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. (Speak

in a whisper.) We slip into this

space half cognizant. The land is very

large indeed: bones of the earth

worn down, though she is a living thing.

See how she exposes her grace? Antelopes

graze on the far plain—their high,

white tails—the red soil throbs

its slow heartbeat, and the blue sky

clears so smartly, perfectly, like

radiance. Are the ancestors near?

What can we know? We decide

to wander around this prairie, mistaken

for Utes, buy commodities in little towns.51

And while Marks notes that communicating in a woman’s language is more subversive than love-making, the abundance of the land, bones of the earth, red soil throbs, is unlocked for both Miranda and Gould in the body, in what Monique Wittig lastingly calls The Lesbian Body—here the Indigenous lesbian body—its indestructibility outside of colonial heteropatriarchal coordinates and political formations. Finding in the body connection to the land (or perhaps vice versa), Gould describes, “I know / we must be circling Paradise / because the ants enter the fleshy petals / of the roadside flowers with evident / joy and purpose (oh, my dark, pretty one),” rhyming the flesh of sex with that of the land. Miranda also describes the disorientation of this other land found in the body through sexuality.52

After twelve hundred miles together

we enter green forest thick along a fearless river.

This dense topography we can’t see through,

can’t find the horizon to judge distances

or the arc of the sun to know east from west.

There at last you clasp my hand, guide it

to a place beyond maps,

no universe I have ever known.

It is a raw landscape; we are the sojourners

overcome by the perilous shock of arrival.

We stop the car, walk by the river,

clumsy, frightened by desire. I wish

for more than body or soul can bear.53

For Miranda, the ecstatic and eccentric deformation of the land, of its violent colonial heteropatriarchal markings, is tied to a desire that is destructive, that is based on destruction, I wish / for more than body or soul can bear. In and through desire and its intimacy with destruction, she and Gould find a permanent temporary home in the weave of language, body, and land as a site free from control, unbound, boundless “where every direction took us home / but no place could give us shelter.”54 Errant. Disorienting. Exposed. The disjunctions, though, in the impossible achievement of such a space are hard to bear and deform the lesbian narrative of awakening, “I don’t know how to survive awakening / in a woman’s body with a child’s / broken heart.”55 Interruption. Longing. Loneliness. The body, land, are now permanently marked by loss seeking only a way to express itself, “How can I learn this trick, will your body / back to the other side of my skin? Help me / translate loss the way this land does— / flood, earthquake, landslide— / terrible, and alive.”56

Mishuana Goeman has written powerfully about the (re)mapping practices that Indigenous women perform in literature, reshaping the creative imaginary of the “settler nation” and what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “European planetary consciousness.”57 As Goeman writes, “(Re)mapping . . . is the labor Native authors and the communities they write within and about undertake, in the simultaneously metaphoric and material capacities of map making, to generate new possibilities,” and “(re)mapping is about acknowledging the power of Native epistemologies in defining our moves towards spatial decolonizations.”58 These are mapping practices that, as Indigenous feminists have long acknowledged, confront the shadow of death and violence that haunts Indigenous women: the settler heteropatriarchal state and its structure of femicide.59 What Miranda and Gould in their intertextual correspondence offer to this discussion is a practice of mapping the Indigenous lesbian body through their overabundance of communication that spills outside the bounds of acceptable text, identity, literature, boundary. It is a mapping practice intractably marked by violence, by layers of violence connected to the Destruction, a profound loss of even the coordinates of culture and Indigenous epistemology, and of the absence of an Indigenous conception of lesbianism. In these absences they find bounty, akin to Pico’s dark part inside, here translated into the loss of Indigenous sex and gender relational forms. In the inchoate but not really known—manifest in feelings—lies a search toward a space of neutrality as escape from the western colonial grid of cisheteropatriarchal sexuality. Miranda and Gould’s movements are ambiguous in relation to what Goeman, borrowing from Diné poet Esther Belin, calls “directional memory.”60 In a postapocalyptic space, their movements invite a certain stillness at the core, direction as a sign, a painful one.

In Bad Indians, Miranda traces a process of awakening to this violence and to her desire through the painful encounters she has with men. Using the metaphor of a knife, which she derives from her first memory—of her father holding a knife to her mother’s throat, she describes the forging and sharpening and wielding and sheathing and eventually the melting of this blade into lesbian desire as a biography of the trajectory of violence in her life. The knife moves through unspeakable, horrific encounters (her being raped at seven years old by a friend of her mother’s; holding a gun to her father’s head), mundane manifestations (her inability to stave off her anger toward her children, marrying her high school English teacher), and is eventually melted down in her sexual desire and yet she holds it still in her writing in another form.

I write these words down with the tip of a pen forged out of grief and violence. I’ll send these stories out where other women are waiting, slashed by nightmares and fear. Cutting themselves, their children. Sometimes security is a knife that slits your own wrists. Nothing in my life or world prepared me to suspect such a thing. I kept trying to play by the rules I’d learned: the cure for poverty and loss is property and surety. The remedy for violence and alcoholism is control and cold rationality. The way to fill the gaping hole left by abandonment is to never leave; not even to save your own life. The balm for self-hatred is to marry white skin; or to desire skin so much like your own that scars arise of their own accord out of shared histories left unresolved. It’s none of that.61

Writing, “Indian languages which originate from the gleaming throats of birds,” fear of automatic writing because of its intimacy with mental illness, “writing words that might have the power to take away my children permanently.”62 Through writing, Miranda seeks to ride the wave of destruction, to harness its forces as a reparative practice, to invoke its dangers and risks as a weak violence, through desire, through overabundance, through writing. She seeks to write the lesbian body as survival, in conversation, intertextually, and therefore to rewrite the whole world.

Sedgwick famously locates reparative practices in and as a weak position in analytic (if not actual) opposition to a strong theoretical position of paranoid critique. Critique, in this sense, buttresses the ego (anticipation and avoidance of humiliation) and systematically attempts to account for as many phenomena as possible through critical exposure, what Moten and Harney refer to as the work of the professional critical academic.63 Critique elucidates and thereby overvalues its object, interested primarily in the value of achievement. But, as Sedgwick reminds us, this will-to-make-visible is complicated by the fact that visibility or making visible is itself a violent act, desire, and epistemology.64 Interpretive strategies that focus on disciplinary knowledge production bring a world of action and motion into focus in strong forms that overwhelm, suppress, and/or invalidate weak, minor, or otherwise more vulnerable ones. These strategies determine the space of visible antagonism, which often takes the form of historical progress or other types of class conflict, as the only option available. A weak epistemology, on the other hand, is more interested in how things fail in specific and often anticolonial ways, including the space of the failure to be visible that, despite Gould’s reference to a hidden otherness, is not the space of the hidden (the hidden is merely the other side of the visible). Outside the discursive formation of objects, of clearly delineated subject-positions, of concepts and strategies, lies a world that often doesn’t get perceived as existing but that paradoxically, in its ongoing destruction and perpetual replacement, conditions the colonial world of action and being, which is entirely dependent on the effaced Indigenous world and its perpetuation as merely condition, predecessor, somehow past. Such a site is one of anticolonial struggle.

This is the world Gould references in her description of a song her mother sang in a scale she could never learn, an unlearnable song that nonetheless organizes Gould’s poetics into an orientation. In her deliciously anticipated response to Miranda’s letter about not having stories, Gould writes, “You do have stories . . . those stories your dad tells are connected with older stories, stories that might not have been passed down to you, but which existed and maybe even still exist in a world that isn’t this one . . . It is a fragment in one way, but like the shard of a pot that can be restored.”65 Songs, stories, culture, and bodies act as shards, pieces that collectively and in their reparative rearticulation point in the direction of a world that isn’t this one. This orientation without a clear, untroubled direction informs much of Bad Indians, in the stories, through the poetics of the text, and in the book’s difficult sociality of being bad Indians and having bad feelings in common. Tom Miranda, Deborah Miranda’s grandfather, whose recorded tapes and stories she transcribes, offers Miranda such an orientation. He tells the story of a mysterious light that keeps attracting him, a light seen from afar at night as he sits and ponders. While he “wanted to see . . . where the hell that light was coming from,” Miranda understands the light as having a delayed dis/orientation: “His words, spoken when I was still a child, hovered in the air for years, waiting to find me, waiting for me to listen. Waiting for me to look at both the blessing and the genocide.”66 A state of suspension, withdrawn from time, from relations, for generations, the recorded words and thereby this light become forms of absorption, captivation, a leaning toward, an intransitive openness, to be taken (in) by this other world and one’s self-otherness, without revelation.

The light, as Miranda later discovers, leads in the direction of Mount Diablo and therefore either toward a creation story or toward the first airplane beacon erected in California, a dilemma Miranda refuses to decide. Following this same direction toward an undecidable destination, along archival paths, Miranda is led to another indeterminate story told by Spanish soldiers about chasing a group of Indian runaways from a mission who took refuge on the mountain and ended up cornered with seemingly no escape. It was too dark for the conquistadors to catch them, so they waited until morning only to find the mountain empty. From the conquistadors’ perspective, clearly el Diablo [the Devil] helped them escape. But Miranda imagines the story told among the Indians: “places of power are not tread on lightly; runaway Indians understand the power of the mountain’s reputation. Fleeing to the mountain is an act of desperation, perhaps even a call for help. The mountain is a being, infused with the power of creation, from root to cloud. The rocks, soil, meadows, streams, trees, sun—all sacred, sacred, sacred, sacred,” echoing Gould.67 Either way, diabolical or inappropriately associated with other-than-human beings, what is left is a story about bad Indians.

The ambiguity and ambivalence of stories is an opening onto what Rei Terada, following Jacques Derrida, calls the “nonway.”68 More than an impasse, or a slowing down of violent colonial progress, the nonway is neither a path nor its interruption but an original disorientation that foregoes the dialectical tension and development of passage and blockage. There, where the way is not open, is an “other something in the background” unrelated to movement and stillness and yet conditioning both. The ambiguity and ambivalence of stories indicate and orient toward the nonway as unassimilable to choice, to a world of activity in the service of (colonial) life; the nonway is therefore open to the infinite, and stories in their ambivalence are not simply reducible to resistance or powerlessness. “Potentially the largest and most positive [realm], despite its negative name,” the nonway lies outside dualities such as rational and irrational, in which “the language of logical argument talks in its sleep about settlement and expropriation, colonialism and racial capitalism in noonday life.”69 If this rational language talks in its sleep, it is a sleep without dreams, of the utterly diurnal that forbids both dream as a strange day in the night and the night in the day that is the nonway itself. More fundamental than critical investigation into and rational argumentation about these violent forces (Sedgwick’s strong theory) is the end of the world that has been rendered unthinkable by these very forces. What is the end of the world, as described by Miranda, if not a call to attend to a world that has been rendered irreal? A nonworld that conditions the noonday one of the colonizer. A world that isn’t this one experienced through a Maidu song one cannot learn or unlearn. This question is the question of story, destruction, and the reparative.

In the introduction to Bad Indians, Miranda details the destructive nature of story: being told she isn’t a “real Indian,” including by other Natives, “because I do not have the language of my ancestors, and much of our culture was literally razed to the ground”; the exclusion of Native Americans from the American literary canon (until, according to Miranda, N. Scott Momaday won the Pulitzer in 1969 for House Made of Dawn); education and the suppression of Indigenous voice, because “the gatekeepers of literature have kept us outside by making education and literacy so undesirable and so painful,” an effect of the violence of assimilation and the targeted destruction of Indianness; the disparagement of Indigenous storying by rendering it into primitive beliefs to be studied as objects; and the erasure of violence in telling the history of California, including the whitewashing of the history of the missions for generations of fourth graders.70 As Miranda notes, “this story has done more damage to California Indians than any conquistador, priest, soldado de cuera (leather-jacket soldier), smallpox, measles, or influenza virus” as it has “taught us to kill ourselves and each other with alcohol, domestic violence, horizontal racism, internalized hatred.”71

Of course, as Miranda makes clear in Bad Indians, California Indians, along with other Indigenous peoples of the Americas, had already been dreamed into existence as bad long before the onset of colonization. Our story had preceded us, and that story was something: humungous penises, sex with animals, human-animal offspring, cannibals, mutated monsters, bloodthirsty devils. This is a story that stuck, as Deborah Miranda describes its persistence: “All my life, I have heard only one story about California Indians: godless, dirty, stupid, primitive, ugly, passive, drunken, immoral, lazy, weak-willed people who might make good workers if properly trained and motivated. What kind of story is this to grow up with?”72 Highlighting the statement who might make good workers if properly trained and motivated, all the other adjectives in that sentence—godless, dirty, stupid, primitive, ugly, passive, drunken, and so on—shift and warp in value when their role is considered in promoting something other than work, other than colonial labor or knowledge production, other than western aesthetics and civilizationist conceptions of the human, and other than settler developmental futurity and its presupposed “goodness.”

The colonial categories of the social and the political have both been used, often together, to relegate Indigenous worlds and modes of interrelationality with other beings to the irrational and illegible or, at best, to the realm of apolitical or pre-political belief to be studied and categorized by anthropologists. Marisol de la Cadena has detailed how the coloniality of politics and sociality operates through creating and becoming exclusively a human realm requiring an intellectual disciplinary divide: the humanities, arts, and social sciences study the activities of humans while nature is studied by the hard sciences.73 Politics, in this project, is explicitly and exclusively a form of human antagonism in social and economic realms, producing an empirical field (the ontic). Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between politics (ontic) and the political (ontological), de la Cadena notes how the political, on the other hand, attends to the fundamental split that separates humans, now a distinct category, from nature, a split that doesn’t exist within Indigenous frameworks (neither does the category of nature).74 Indigenous worlds and modes of relating, through the colonial ontic categories of human and nature, are thereby rendered unintelligible.

María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo complicates and furthers this discussion by noting that the Spanish understood Indigenous modes of governance and sociality to be invitations to absorb Indigenous peoples into the colonial theological and economic project and worldview.75 Reflecting on how the encounter with Indigenous peoples of the Americas conditions the historical production of humanism, Saldaña-Portillo analyzes the sixteenth-century debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, during the Junta de Valladolid, on “just” methods of conquest in the “New World,” as two sides of the same humanist coin.76 Following Jodi Byrd’s suggestion that the figure of the Indian was a necessary condition and counterpoint for the production of western humanism in its ongoing colonial form, Saldaña-Portillo locates a productive tension in the different responses during the debate to the question of Indigenous capacity for conversion. De las Casas and Sepúlveda’s opposition hinged on the question of whether Indigenous people were intellectually capable of freedom—whether, that is, they are internally enslaved and must come to the Christian faith by force or whether they are able to choose it of their own accord.

Famously, in the context of Christianity’s antagonism with the Ottoman Empire, Sepúlveda argued that Indigenous people are enslaved to their passions and unable to come into the Christian fold on their own, necessitating European domination and mastery in the encomienda system as a disciplinary practice. De las Casas, for his part, drew on his experience as a missionary among the Indigenous people of Oaxaca and Chiapas and argued for their agency based on their perceived humanity. In his apologia En defensa de los indios, he argued that the “cultivated friendship” and “common fellowship” of the Indigenous peoples are signs of their preparedness for Christian community and unity, a point that echoes Pope Paul III, who defended Indigenous capacity in his papal bull Sublimis Deus in 1537 and is echoed later by Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote in 2007 that at the time of conquest the Indians had already been longing for conversion, which had been nonviolent.77 What is noteworthy is that Sepúlveda and de las Casas agreed on the basic definitions, conditions, and value of human sociality and politics; they tended to emphasize different aspects of Indigenous sociality, however. Sepúlveda highlighted Indigenous peoples’ human sacrifice, cannibalism, abortion, incest, and adultery, all tied to the general theme of their diabolical nature and inability to make appropriate distinctions between humans and nonhumans, leading to charges of bestiality and witchcraft. De las Casas saw, on the other hand, a general if primitive or inchoate form of sociality that merely needed to be coaxed into human—that is, Christian—shape through the eradication of the Indian part.

Saldaña-Portillo compellingly argues that the unifying project of converting Indigenous heathens, in which both Sepúlveda and de las Casas were differentially engaged, had the effect of democratizing paternalistic responsibility for Indigenous peoples among colonizers.78 Such collaborative paternalism created, according to her, the conditions for modern international human rights law based on the unity of humanity and the democratization of responsibility grounded in a shared capacity for reason. Indigenous people had promise but needed to have the Indian beat out of them; if they resisted and therefore died, so much the better. Saldaña-Portillo, referencing the work of the Spanish enlightenment jurist Francisco de Vitoria, details how international modern law weaponized human reason as the base condition of sociality for colonial purposes. “Indians were compelled to allow Spaniards into their dominions,” according to Vitoria, because the law of nations compels them to “love” the Spaniards “as they would love any neighbor.”79 These are the conditions for the creation of a singular world through human sociality, “one world, one domain, one geography of humanity” that links Europeans and their fantasied others through a co-constitutive process of making each other human, differentially as determined by proximity to the straight, white, property-owning, cis male norm—as Sylvia Wynter, in her body of work, has thoroughly shown. This humanizing process renders Indigenous worlds and interrelations with other beings, such as Mount Diablo, illegible, nonsensical, perverse through the closure and coloniality of both politics and the social as solely human affairs. As de la Cadena notes, though, at least the interpretation of the freedom of Indians as the work of el Diablo cast them and their relationship to the mountain as being in antagonism with Christian humanity; the western secular interpretation of politics and the social eradicates even this.

The critical call for a stronger politicality or sociality within colonial situations, settler and otherwise, can contribute to the ongoing colonization of Indigenous peoples, lands, and worlds through humanism. And the critical modes for unveiling suppressed political and social energies, as well as supposedly hidden forms of violence, invest those energies into a stronger, more tensile and flexible coloniality. The cultivation of Indigenous humanity has long been a project of colonization, and this undergirds critiques of the notion of dehumanization, which depends on a presupposed humanity as well as critiques of the concept of dispossession. Producing property through a retroactive attribution of ownership to Indigenous peoples as proto-humans, the notion of dispossession replaces Indigenous nonpropertied, nonhuman-centric, and collective interrelations with appropriately human ones.80 In the same way, the concepts of the political and the social both project a colonial, human-centric mode of relating onto an imagined Indigenous past for the sake of a settler humanized future. Together these different aspects contribute to Povinelli’s “governance of the prior,” the use of temporal logics and conceptions of prior ownership—for example, through British common law in the context of certain settler states—to paradoxically expropriate land and use land itself as a commodity and resource to manage Indigeneity as a humanistic category.81

Arguments about assimilation, development, western humanism, denaturalization and other forms of critical historicism, including the end of history, are based on the basic premise that Indigenous peoples are simultaneously outside of time and also the threshold through which history begins (and sometimes how it ends). It is a logic that must be ritualistically renewed through the repetitive assertion of violent re-beginnings (the forces of recognition, apology, and reconciliation through Indian law and policy), founded on the paradox of Indigeneity as never being fully present (perpetually disappearing, merely occupying, potentially or partially human) and yet ongoing as the framework of settler colonial continuity (settler Indigenizing, the governance of the prior).

This gives us a sense of the extent of the destruction of California Indians, why it is never a complete annihilation or elimination, and how this incompleteness becomes the condition for ongoing destruction through what Jasbir Puar calls “debilitation.”82 It also details the nonway, the delegitimated Indigenous world, as itself the site of struggle. To escape the mode of debilitation, the shards that indicate a world other than this one not only open onto a nonway that lies outside of the colonial double bind of the prior, as they merely indicate, but also importantly operate within the ambiguity and ambivalence of story—for Miranda, one that revolves around the question of literature. Literature is an apt form for engaging such a space considering its lack of referentiality and lack of performative force: it is related to the world neither as shelter nor as a set of goals; having receded, goals cease and all falls silent; in it something else speaks.83 And yet, I have already noted that Miranda discusses the exclusion of Native Americans from “American literature” (what does such a phrase even mean? Does it have the same meaning and double bind as “politics” and “the social”?), an exclusion that doesn’t merely take place in the field of representation but operates at a disciplinary and pedagogical level as well. In relation to the coloniality of politics and the social, though, the question of whether or not a California Indian literature exists operates at an even more fundamental level of the destruction. To get there, Miranda traces the destruction in its fragmentary connections to her own story. In writing about her childhood, Miranda asks, “How can I put this into words you’ll understand? Armageddon had already happened. I was three years old. My father had been incarcerated at San Quentin . . . My mother had run away. My two older siblings were put into foster care. I had been taken from the apartment we lived in, and I never saw it again . . . Every single familiar thing in the world had disappeared.”84 An atmosphere of threat or dread permeates much of the book: “All my life, I knew I would disappear. I knew my presence here on earth was so tentative that I was in constant danger of being devoured, absorbed, vanished.”85 This threat, this dread is the position and mood through which other stories, archival materials, are experienced. This position and mood is the question of literature for Miranda and produces a fraught poetics.

Bad Indians itself threatens to disappear: into the words of others (colonizers and Indians alike, as well as into the problem of identity) from whom most of the text is taken; into the crevasses between disciplines, in which the text lingers; into the materiality and brutality of the sources it engages; and most fundamentally into the question of literature. This is all to say, into the archive that cultivates and destroys it. The careful selection, textual shaping, and juxtaposition of the words of others—of Spanish priests, anthropologically mediated stories, self-recordings of Miranda’s grandfather, along with snippets from newspaper stories, repurposed educational materials about the missions, a novena [prayer] to bad Indians—produces a poetry not of the word or the line but of discourse, of genre, and of the materiality and violence of the archive. It is a mosaic and a problematic embodiment of the text that engages the affective force of what feel like, in some cases, death sentences, the dread of seeing, hearing, and feeling judgments passed. Reading newspaper accounts of the casual violence against Indians, for instance, gives a sense of helplessness, knowing that what is about to come is inevitable, as it has been since the first publication of the article, that nothing about it can be done.

San Francisco Bulletin, May 12, 1859

An old Indian and his squaw

Were engaged in the harmless occupation

Of gathering clover

On the land of a Mr. Grigsby

When a man

Named Frank Hamilton

Set Grigsby’s dogs upon them

(which, by the way, are three

Very ferocious ones,)

And before the dogs were taken off

Of the Indians, they tore

And mangled the body

Of the squaw

In such a manner that she died

Shortly after. It is said

The dogs

Tore her breasts off her.

The Digger man

Escaped without any serious

Injury, although bitten

Severely. Of course

It was the dogs’ fault

Although Hamilton had lived with Grigsby

Over a year and knew full well

The character of the dogs

For this is not the first

Instance of their biting persons.

But he only set them on

For fun

And they were

Only Diggers.

There is talk of having Hamilton

Arrested but no doubt

It is all talk.86

We see, hear, and feel this inevitability also in the recast words of Junipero Serra.

Seeing your people come through the fields

We noticed a great flock of birds

Of various and beautifully blended colors

Such as we had never seen before.

We noticed a great flock of birds

Swooping out of the heaven just ahead

Such as we had never seen before

As if they came to welcome our newly arrived guests.

Swooping out of the heavens just ahead

Six or more soldiers set out together on horseback

As if they came to greet their newly acquired hosts

In the far distant rancherias even many leagues away.

Six or more soldiers set out together on horseback.

Both men and women at sight of them took to their heels

In the far distant rancherias even many leagues away,

Fleeing the soldiers, clever as they are at lassoing cows.

Both men and women at sight of them took to their heels

But the women were caught with Spanish ropes.

The soldiers, clever as they are at lassoing cows

Preyed on the women for their unbridled lust.

The women were caught with Spanish ropes

Indian men defended their wives—

Prey for the Spaniards’ unbridled lust—

Only to be shot down with bullets.

The Indian men tried to defend their wives

Of various and beautifully blended colors

Only to be shot down with bullets

Seeing your people come through the fields.87

Using reports (death sentences) to produce poetry and story, using the words of killers in this way, does two things. First, these words and images are intolerable, and this intolerability pulls the thread of poetry so tight, indicates the impoverishment of language so intensely, tugs on the tongue so viciously, that it puts the very project of literature into question, from root to cloud. The distance between the forced/stolen language and the use of form, also forced/stolen, vibrates with the series of negations that excluded California Indians from literature: representation negated before it even exists (giving the sense that the law barring California Indians from testifying against whites in the nineteenth century has become a state of being), literature negated before it exists (oral story’s exclusion from literature), language negated (the white supremacist, theocratic, nationalistic, monolingualist project of destroying the more than one hundred distinct languages and more than three hundred dialects spoken in Indigenous California and their replacement with Spanish and then English), and the negation of the world through epistemic means. In relation to language, story takes place, for Miranda, at the third level of the destruction of the Esselen language, a language systematically destroyed by and replaced with Spanish, which was systematically destroyed by and replaced with English. Miranda movingly narrates this deterritorializing relation in recounting two different intensive summer language classes she took, Spanish for graduate school and archival research and a California Indian language revitalization class taken later in life, echoing the temporal inversions of a genealogy of violence.88 The point, as she notes, is to create a third language “to describe a second language that destroyed my first language . . . blade to slice my tongue,” an English that is not of English.89 To lick the blade along the edge.

Along the thin blade, Miranda puts the descriptions of genocidal sexual violence and killing into poetic form, raising the effect to a point that recasts such destruction and violence in her robust sense of story as reparative destruction. It reinvents these difficult words as a California Indian story, first, foremost, and perhaps solely. It is our destruction, emphasizing the ambiguity of the preposition in the phrase the destruction of California Indians. The archive, documentation, disciplinary formations, and all the edifices built up to support the western liberal figuration of the human who so casually reduced Indigenous people to violable bodies are turned instead into story. Bad Indians uses poetry, uses the destructive aspects of literature itself, to begin to swallow the archive and the voices of killers, assimilating and absorbing them, making them disappear. And we don’t know where it stops. Miranda has described how her editor at Heyday Books, Malcolm Margolin, told her upon her first submission of the manuscript that it wasn’t done yet. It can never be finished as it is a profoundly open text. One that, through its poetics, asks the question: Is everything poetry or is nothing? Makes the selection each time, specifically and poetically, and puts it into form, thereby extending the unanswerable question to infinity. It destroys the archive as proof, as use. And yet, it is a form of research in what Leanne Simpson describes as being both the instrument and the song, a terrible song, with serrated edges, burnt red rim slicing into the Pacific.90

The theme of rearticulating shards according to a song that one cannot learn describes quite specifically the problem of literature in the wake of destruction. As I noted earlier, the Armenian scholar Marc Nichanian details a condition of the loss of literature in such situations in the turn to the archive, to documentation, to the need to prove what happened as a sort of tyranny of archival logics. For him, this destruction invites further catastrophe: the need to orient all narratives toward making a case, to tell the truth of what happened in organized, temporal order, according to the executioner’s own logic and demand, to tell the story in a certain, juridically organized way. While Nichanian sees the death of literature in the logic of the proof, Miranda turns the issue on its head by appealing to the archive, to the stories told and recorded in it, as the site of literary production. This doubling of destruction raises questions: What about stories that don’t get acknowledged as being literature? Of peoples defined as nonliterate? What if, rather than a further catastrophe in the death of literature, literature in its western, recognizable form has already deemed the destruction of a people’s stories to be unrecognizable? Literature as the destruction and replacement of story. How do you then begin to articulate catastrophe and loss?

To answer this question, it’s not only to the words of killers that Miranda turns: “I see Vicenta’s story [as told by Isabel Meadows to the salvage ethnographer J. P. Harrington] as a precursor to modern Native literature, a stepping-stone between oral literacy and written literature.”91 While this quote implies a sort of progression from orality to the written as the basis of literature, this movement isn’t so clear elsewhere in Miranda’s writing. Miranda’s intertextual relation to Isabel Meadows and her stories is a case in point. Meadows was born in Carmel Valley in 1846 and was a member of a local Esselen-Rumsen mixed family. A speaker of Rumsen, Esselen, Spanish, and English, with a good amount of knowledge about tribal culture and language, as well as family stories, Meadows became an important resource for the controversial ethnographer J. P. Harrington, who worked with her for several years throughout the 1930s up until her death in 1939, even moving her out to Washington, DC. Miranda engages Meadows’s archive significantly for Bad Indians, noting both the role of Meadows in producing stories for future generations as well as her role in Miranda’s own family: One of Meadows’s half brothers married Miranda’s great-great-great-grandmother, and she also vouched for many of Miranda’s relatives on their BIA applications. A source of many of the stories in Bad Indians, including direct language transcribed into the text, as well as a generative site of the production of texts beyond Bad Indians, Meadows and her archive elicit an engagement with the question of what constitutes a California Indian literature.92 “My aim is to restore Meadows to her rightful place as author of her own stories, move those stories from the category of ‘social sciences’ to the more appropriate category of ‘Literature or expressive culture,’ and show that Isabel has a clear purpose in depositing these stories with Harrington: to preserve information from Ancestors in ways she knew would provide necessary information for future generations.”93

Complicating this project is the relationship between literature and what constitutes information in Meadows’s archive. The difficult stories I noted in the introduction. In “Extermination of the Joyas,” in relation to Meadows’s stories Miranda develops a practice of “learning how to re-read the archive through the eyes of a mixed-blood California Indian lesbian poet and scholar.”94 This practice of rereading entails renaming a page from Harrington’s field notes “Jotos” and reading it as a petroglyph. “When I touch it, so much else must be known, communicated, and understood to see the power within what looks like a simple inscription, a random bit of Carmel Mission Indian trivia.”

Linking this reading practice to an archaeology of gender and sexuality, Miranda understands this Indigenous reading and writing practice as oriented toward a world that isn’t this one. The term Joya, for instance, is intimately associated with grief, as the term refers to third-gendered people who underwent genocidal destruction by the Spanish, who saw in their existence direct evidence of California Indian depravity. The Spanish interpreted the Joyas’ perceived inappropriate gendering as a tactic to, for instance, be among the women for the purposes of sexual transgression. Understanding the Joyas’ existence the only way the rigid cisheteropatriarchy of the church and state could (with clear resonances with contemporary transphobia), “the priest and soldiers completely misunderstood the situation, and assumed that this man [sic] was ‘sinning’—that is, sneaking into the women’s work area dressed as a woman to flirt or have sex with them.”95 More distressing were the accounts of the soldiers who understood the Joyas to be “sodomites” to be exterminated. Miranda recounts the homophobic words of a Spanish soldier, Pedro Fages, who in 1775 wrote:

I have substantial evidence that those Indian men who, both here and farther inland, are observed in the dress, clothing, and character of women—there being two or three such in each village—pass as sodomites by profession (it being confirmed that all these Indians are much addicted to this abominable vice) and permit the heathen to practice the execrable, unnatural abuse of their bodies. They are called joyas, and are held in great esteem. Let this mention suffice for a matter which could not be omitted,—on account of the bearing it may have on the discussion of the reduction of these natives,—with a promise to revert in another place to an excess so criminal that it seems even forbidden to speak its name. . . . But we place our trust in God and expect that these accursed people will disappear with the growth of the missions. The abominable vice will be eliminated to the extent that the Catholic faith and all the other virtues are firmly implanted there, for the glory of God and the benefit of those poor ignorants.96

Miranda details the various forms of terror the Spanish unleashed on the Joyas as well as the devastating decision by many tribal peoples to turn against the Joyas for their own survival. On top of the direct forms of torture and murder, Miranda notes the violences of renaming (replacing with Spanish interpretations) and regendering through discipline and shame, to conform with Spanish conceptions of cisheteropatriarchy. She also notes the complex roles that the Joyas held in California Indian communities, of great esteem, including spiritual ones, as mourners and mediators to the dead. The gendercide committed by the Spanish created a need in California Indian communities that was initially filled by ‘aqui [post-menopausal women] and then eventually the Catholic Church. Direct murder, renaming, regendering, and replacement all contributed to what Miranda calls gendercide.

The field note/petroglyph that opens the discussion of the sexual and spiritual or interrelational convergence in the Joyas and the destruction of this relationality is primarily about a distant cousin of Miranda’s, Victor Acedo, whose sexuality moves in a relational direction toward the women who raised him.97 Called Joteras in the note, they are central figures in Isabel Meadows’s stories of women who resisted in the missions, had sex with whomever they wanted, had many children with many men, and who were interpreted by Spanish mores to be a mix of masculine and feminine, but it was their relation to Victor Acedo, who was gay, that caused them to be dubbed Joteras. Such a notion of relation is deeper than association or affiliation, as it ties directly to the syntax of many California Indian languages that decentralizes the subject, emphasizes positionality, and associates relationships through existential categories and not possession: it’s never “my child is gay,” but “I am gay in respect to [child’s name].”98 Gayness is the mediation of kinship. In terms of the coloniality of politics and the social, these actions by bad Indians are apolitical (in the colonial sense) and antisocial on many levels. The fundamental Indigenous interrelationality deemed diabolical by the colonizer links the modes of sexuality with relationships to all sorts of beings as part of the same epistemic conditions, what Kim Tallbear calls an Indigenous critical polyamory, an opening onto a world lived otherwise.99

The poetics associated with this world, that orient one toward it, operate within what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a hatred of “all literature of masters” (perhaps meant doubly, both aesthetic masters and colonial masters).100 Story, in this sense, sweeps away all difference between the language and theory of the everyday and that of the elite. It’s an interruption of systems of value. We see this destruction and its possibilities in an anecdote by Harrington, relayed in Bad Indians in the section titled “Gonaway Tribe.”101 Harrington sets the scene in the typical ethnographic arrival description: “Arrived here amidst mud and rain. There are twenty-one Indians left. Very few of them old and wise! The ones I have found are living with the younger Indians near town. This is bad because the young Indians tell the old ones to ask for money, but I get around that by telling them that I am to pay a certain price and no more.”102 Immediately placing the anecdote under the sign of value, Harrington replaces Indigenous protocols and modes of interrelation with the secular demand for Indigenous stories for research and the calculating work of ethnographic collection. When “the old woman, Sadie, says that [he is] fortunate in coming here in the wintertime because it is against the law of her people to tell these stories she told me in the summertime. She says if she told a story like this in the summer a rattlesnake would bite her,” Harrington insists upon an economy of scarcity in which Indigenous people are always impoverished: “But I bet with a dollar bill or two flashing in her face, she would forget her law.”103 Fretting over the standard perceived disappearance of Indigenous people, Harrington refuses to let the inclement weather and consideration for others, including his “informants,” get in the way of his task: “These Indians are altogether too civilized . . . they keep saying I should come back when the sun is out, that I mess up their houses and track mud in.”104 Yet, the value of these stories, perceived by Harrington through an economy of scarcity and a logic of authenticity, is offset by their translation into valueless objects of study according to the coloniality of politics and the social: “Susie says that white people do not pay enough but I told her that there is no work to this, all she would have to do is talk.”105 Just talk, no work at all. The highly valued “work” of literature is nowhere to be seen. In its place is the workless work of story, just talk. The anecdote ends, quite appropriately, with the hatred of masters: “My, how the Petie Simpsons hate white people—they could not use too many words in telling me. It is a good thing they don’t know that this research is for the Smithsonian.”106

Remember: Indians don’t work. Too natural, therefore unproductive, unable to own and master property; full of bad behavior and qualities, godless, dirty, stupid, primitive, ugly, passive, drunken, immoral, lazy, weak-willed people who might make good workers if properly trained and motivated. “Bad Indians” means all of this. Poor quality, unpleasant, harmful, without virtue, offensive, unwell, putrid, negative feelings, worthless. For Harrington these were bad Indians, disruptive of his research, wanting too much money, not authentic enough, hating white people. The bad Indians connected to each other through bad feelings: hatred, grief, loneliness, anger, resentment. They are excluded from, in opposition to, the work of the master, which attains its ultimate form not just in the work of art or scholarship but in the gradual achievement of human mastery and freedom: a total realization of a liberatory process.

In a context in which English departments are still dominated by American and British literature, by the work in the sense of the literary object and of the gradual achievement of human mastery and freedom—the humanities buttressed by a general historicity—Miranda’s workless work Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir calls us to another task through the question of literature. Does a California Indian literature exist? bears both on literature in general and its pedagogy, as well as the centralizing of American and British canons through a tie that can only ever be temporal. American and British literatures are historical only in the sense that Vine Deloria describes in God Is Red: “The very essence of Western European identity involves the assumption that time proceeds in a linear fashion; further it assumes that at a particular point in the unraveling of this sequence, the peoples of Western Europe became the guardians of the world. The same ideology that sparked the Crusades, the Age of Exploration, the Age of Imperialism, and the recent crusade against Communism all involve the affirmation that time is peculiarly related to the destiny of Western Europe. And later, of course, the United States.”107

Note the resonance between this quote and the following, written by the head of a Department of English in Nairobi, as related by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in his chapter “Quest for Relevance”: “The English Department . . . has built up a strong syllabus which by its study of the historic continuity of a single culture throughout the period of emergence of the modern west makes it an important companion to History and Philosophy and Religious Studies. However, it is bound to become less British, more open to other writing in English (American, Caribbean, African, Commonwealth) and also to continental writing, for comparative purposes.”108 Ignoring the murderous history of the British in Kenya, the chair seamlessly aligns the national project of Kenyan independence and education with European coloniality. David Lloyd, in his reflection on the continuing significance of Ngũgĩ’s engagement with this problem, notes how this description “gradually synthesizes its disparate strands and influences into a single, unfolding whole.”109 The unification of national literature through canonicity, developing temporality (through epochal arrangements), development of the individual as heroic center of literary narrative, and the pedagogical reproduction of this unity in the student “who becomes its pedagogical object in the form of an ideal of fully cultivated selfhood” accurately depicts the coloniality of English and, more broadly, humanist education.

Ngũgĩ’s response to this situation was to forgo discussions about the problem of inclusion of Kenyan or African literature into the curriculum and to instead call for the abolition of Departments of English: “Here then, is our main question: if there is a need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture,’ why can’t this be African? Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?”110 Lloyd interprets this robust response as a turn away from temporal colonial consistency, as described by Deloria, and toward a spatial model of organization that privileges regional and often neglected, suppressed, or actively destroyed forms of literature, or, more accurately in relation to Ngũgĩ’s project, forms of “orature,” eliding the temporally and colonially structured divide between orality and literacy.111 To the question, then, of whether a California Indian literature exists must be added the question does an American literature exist? This question is especially relevant considering how much the American literary tradition has stolen from Native Americans without acknowledgment (Emerson and Thoreau immediately come to mind), but it’s also an epistemological question in terms of the angle of perception from which literature is viewed. Outside of U.S. perceptions and narratives of temporal progress and unified history, what holds American literature together as some sort of center? It certainly cannot be national, as there’s nothing natal about it. Lloyd suggests, rather, a mode of interrelationality that attends to geographic locality first, not as a center but, following Ngũgĩ, as “networks of cultures, exchanging or ‘interweaving’ with one another without passing through centers.”112 This is a differential relationality that nonetheless begins with Indigenous orature.

Bad Indians indicates that perhaps a California Indian “literature” is not just impossible but already exhausted in the question, akin to Indigenous lesbian literature. From a weak position that destructively disrupts the consolidation of centers of power in each case, California Indian lesbian “orature” as weak literature seeks reparatively to open onto the nonway of the nonworld that isn’t this one in a complementary nonpoetics, and does so by listening to a song one cannot learn and to the Indigenous lesbian body as orienting devices. Bad Indians as orature is radically open and hinges on the ambiguity of disappearance and absence, mobilizing the intertextuality of the archive for this and other queer purposes. Antisocial, apolitical, tenuously held together by bad feelings, by revenge, it maps for us story and a necessary coming to writing that never arrives and yet grounds us in endurance. As Miranda says:

So from the time I could hold a crayon, I scribbled. I scrawled. My hand grew cramped and tired, calluses formed . . . Couldn’t stop, because if I did, I would disappear. Everyone I loved had disappeared. I knew I was next . . . I remember the first word I ever wrote. On a brown paper bag, with a red crayon. D E B Y. I sat at my grandmother’s kitchen counter in a red cabin with white trim, high in the Tehachapi Mountains . . . [Miranda shows her grandmother the writing] that’s when I made a transformative leap in my understanding of being. It was as if, when I wrote those letters, made a written record of myself, my name, my existence, those letters grew roots and plowed down through the Formica countertop, into the wooden floor, beams, and concrete foundation of the cabin, deep into the heart of the Tehachapi Mountains themselves.113

This description comes near the end of the book, in the last chapter, which, in a sense, bookends Bad Indians as beginning with the end of the world and nearly ending with an Armageddon that has already happened, rhyming the destruction of Miranda’s world as a child with that of the destruction of her peoples’ world. The format of Bad Indians indicates the difficult process of storying, which takes on an isomorphism with both culture and strained and broken family relationships: “[To survive her father] You had to want to survive more than you wanted to be good. As we sat there in sudden silence by the fire, our faces hot, [her sister, whom she met much later in life] Louise’s clapperstick mute in her lap, I felt as if I’d put together all the pieces of a mirror that had broken into thousands of shards: This is how our ancestors survived the missions.”114 Using the mirror shards as a recursive, yet fragmentary, reflection on the genealogy of violence, Miranda locates the bad actions and feelings of Native peoples in both the family and the archive as being one and the same. As I noted earlier, the relation between violence in the family and the history of violence is not an uncomplicated identification with her ancestors and the things they did to survive but a sociality across and outside of time through disaffiliation as a form of survival. The layers of these statements in their work across the sinewy and resistant archive creates a recombinant effect—a mosaic, as Miranda describes culture. Neither literature nor discourse on literature but perhaps a bit of both, Bad Indians shows us the intimate, and necessary, entanglement of writing and research, of what it means to be Bad Indians in the archive and the university. To understand the layered and difficult complications of the many meanings of the statement Miranda makes: in order to survive, we became destroyers.

Miranda’s writing is a challenge to historical authority, a refusal in the nonoppositional sense that Audra Simpson offers in her explication of the representational force of the term, as delineating the edge of the text and discourse through attention to what is not said or sayable, like a black hole that absorbs all light and whose existence is only known by its effects on what is seen.115 It’s a form of discursive wrestling, an open, multivalent struggle with power and its material effects, engaging global and world destroying forces in the everyday struggle of living under ongoing genocidal conditions at the thin edge of multiple sovereignties and their failures and limitations, blade to slice my tongue. It’s an acknowledgment of the impossibility for California Indians to hold a privileged position outside of representation in a way in which our very lives wouldn’t be at stake, in the way most historians of California genocide can, and the need therefore to continue to work within/without its terms. In this context, Miranda discursively risks the very question of survival in terms that exacerbate that risk through the vulnerability of the lesbian body, as well as its complex stabilities, securities, and openings onto violence according to the terms of survival. Another way of saying this is that Miranda writes from and with the discomfort of collective bad feelings that organize the fragmented body of the expanded text as an antisociality across disaffiliative and disidentificatory gaps that paradoxically make continuities and collectivities possible as threads of survival and the stickiness of having bad feelings in common. As Madley made clear in the previous chapter, there is no such thing as a voice of genocide. Through writing and study, Miranda offers instead a voice of the Destruction, a way for the ancestors to continue to speak.

Ancestors

In 2019, after a battle with cancer, Janice Gould began her four-day dance at Kahkini Kumme (the spirit dance house) in Estobisim Yamani (the center of the mountain) before embarking on her journey along the feather road.116 Gould and Miranda had not been in contact for many years, likely in large part due to the difficult emotions and complex experiences of their road trip together, but when Miranda found out about Gould’s diagnosis she sent her the following poem:

Dear Friend,

If your body wakes you,

if night is a restless dream

wondering

what’s to come,

let comfort come to you,

touch your cheek,

smooth your forehead

the way your mother did.

Some kinds of love

are older than blood.

Listen, tonight

your ancestors sit with you.

Sleep safe.

They see you, friend—

no walls, no miles,

no years

between generations.

Close your eyes.

Hear those old songs,

a rattling joy—

remember bright rivers,

how beauty flows and circles,

how shining currents

shape the rock—

fight as long as you must.

Hold all the sweetness you can.

Rise up when you are ready.

It won’t be the first time

you’ve had to brave

switchbacks, rockslides,

the hard way home,

but this time

you have gifts

of moonrise, twinflowers,

trilliums, sunrise—

sturdy medicines,

all the companionship

you’ll need.

A direct address, but to the familiar but generic denomination “friend.” How much weight does that word carry? How many referents are sheltered within it? Which emotions does it stir? Does it harbor? Sister, lover, muse, addressee. A secret, intertextual correspondence written through poetry over the years. The pain and healing, excitement and frustration, joy and dread, as well as the calm of time, intermingled in a moment, collapsed in a word. “Friend.” The form of the address calls back to Gould and Miranda’s correspondence and to the question of what companionship means in a postapocalyptic setting, a connection across shared wounds, one that was impossible, made im/possible by a colonial loneliness. Dear Friend. Written at the end and at the beginning, “friend” barely holds it all together. And yet what carries through is love, care, a certain sweetness, a touch of the cheek, a smoothing of the forehead. Written under the conditional “if,” the poem is a hypothetical, if your body wakes you / if night is a restless dream / wondering / what’s to come, marking the distance of space and time between speaker and addressee but also the more fundamental ambiguity of the source of anxiety: what’s to come. Wittig’s lesbian body becomes here a source of mystery, vulnerability, and an opening onto ambiguity itself, lastingly. The speaker cannot know if the addressee’s body wakes her, because of the distance. But she imagines across space and time and outside of both a moment and an intimacy to caress and reassure. Reversing the earlier relationship between lovers, younger and older, indirectly through comfort the addressee is now daughter, the way your mother did. Though, as in the comfort offered by Miranda in Gould’s poetic recounting of their road trip, we are brought once again to a scene of Gould’s head gently cradled in Miranda’s lap.

What follows is a series of soft commands, perhaps whispered to the addressee: listen, sleep safe, close your eyes, hear, remember, fight, hold, rise up. An exercise in the reflex of agency and its release, the speaker eases the addressee’s transition to the other, more infinite, journey. Walls collapse, distances of time and space disappear: the addressee is in the presence of her ancestors. Pure immediacy. The veil between worlds is worn thin. The mosaic is pieced together. And her mother’s song, heard but not learned, is present once again, a rattling joy. The speaker encourages the addressee to fight as long as she must and to hold onto as much sweetness as possible, to grasp onto life before rising up, the most ambiguous and profound phrase of the poem. Rise up when you are ready. And begin your journey home. The nonway, full of rockslides, switchbacks, a hard way home, is a path the addressee has braved before (the nonway is always there; the other world always present, neither passage nor blockage). This time, though, relations to the land and cosmos, flowers and the rhythms of celestial bodies, act as sturdy medicines, gifts to help her along her journey. Gifts: the Koyangk’auwi way of ensuring that their relatives arrive where they need to and do so happily with all that they need. Yet rise up is not an action and therefore no longer a command; it is the cessation of all action and nonaction. It is readiness in its most pure form. Arrival as non-arrival caught in the infinity of nondeparture. All the companionship / you’ll need.

In response, Gould wrote one of her last poems shortly after receiving Miranda’s email with the above poem. Miranda’s message arrived a day before Gould received the news that she was no longer in remission and treatment would no longer help.

Ancestors

Are they near?

Do only the

Koyangk’auwi

show up?

Only those

brown-skinned

women in tule skirts

and caps woven

like baskets

in sedge, red bud,

and maidenhair

fern? The men

bend toward me.

Like the women,

they are bare-chested,

but wear headdresses

decorated in bright

flicker feathers.

Some hold

in their hands

rattles or clappers.

They are singing,

I hear that now,

where I sit

on the rock

hillside above

the North Fork

of the Feather River,

a morning in July

or September,

blue sky above,

far off cloud,

white and puffy,

wind in treetops,

a grosbeak calling,

river rushing by

over hard stones.

Yonder are

the others,

the French and Irish,

who made their way—

such long journeys—

to end up in this

terroir of red soil,

this granite, schist,

and serpentine

country. The French

with moustaches,

the Irish with beards,

their mixedblood

children playing

at their booted

feet, their Indian wives

nearby, gathering

elderberries.

Great-grandfather Beatty

produces a fiddle

and begins a jig,

while the Frenchman,

Orcier, claps,

tapping his sabots

on the rock,

ooh-la, c’est

magnifique!

And now

the English appear,

late-comers

with ruddy faces

and upright postures,

carting among them

bricks and mortar,

insurance forms, a whiff

of superiority, all

except my father,

who ambles slowly

up the trail

with my mother—

they are holding hands

and smiling at the first

of their daughters

to arrive home

safely, no judgment,

just happiness,

and I stand, tears

streaming down my face

to greet them,

the terrible longing

to see them again

diminishing,

like the sudden

gust of warm air that

fingers my black hair -

and departs.

A long thread of a poem, in it every line is enjambed across long sentences with multiple enjambments. The last sentence is strewn across twenty-nine lines. Enacting a discontinuous continuity between the first and last words, Ancestors, departs, Gould has pulled the English language taut; like the string of a guitar it vibrates, holds some kind of space, resonates. She is tuning the language. Jagged-cut poems, it is a map, but one that turns tightly, a narrow, winding passage, everything cut roughly urging the reader on and down, twisting in the mouth/mind, and yet somehow smoothed, like the forehead. Such jaggedness is pushed past its form. Not quite poetry. Almost an extended haiku, form pushed past its limit, it breaks with rules of content by gesturing to something beyond this world. But still breaches meaning. Read aloud or internally, it reads breathlessly. Cadence abrupt, rhythm broken. The story flows down like water over rocks, smoothing the rough edges, burbling at the breaks. The rocks mumble; language speaks. A certain force of gravity. A cliff’s edge. Things stick for a moment and then flow on, a reflex of life. The speaker hangs onto each word, like a sweet goodbye, but also quickly lets them go, lets them tumble on without grasping. Especially the single word carried over from the above line, or left dangling above the rest of the idea, tasting it in the mouth, urging it softly. The speaker tells a story, describes a scene, but there is no complete thought per line; a fact that makes every line a line, and nothing more, and every sentence an opening onto the nonway. Switchbacks. Rockslides. Fragments. Glimpses of images. Like a string of scintillating shards. This path is the hard way home. Time drawn out, holding on as long as one can, cherishing, without possessing, letting go. An exercise in readiness. The most “concrete” of the series of images is a description of sitting on a rock hill above the Feather River (in Northern California, in the homelands of her people) with sketches of images that approach haiku, its lack of image, its effect of reality, is nonetheless the most clearly uncertain, a morning in July / or September. Does it matter which? A brief speculation of a moment. What’s to come. Remaining in the speculative without meaning or weight. Followed by the temporally deep and malleably soft but insistent tension referenced in Miranda’s poem, of stones shaped by the flow of water in rivers. What flows beside the river? Ancestors arrive with songs, a rattling joy.

The beautiful un/certainty of the questions that begin the poem—Are they near? / Do only the / Koyangk’auwi / show up?—questions without answers, points not to an afterlife but to a beside life, around it on all sides, not as its meaning but its absolute lack. Meaning is a momentary refuge, utterly human, and the poem has no time for that, is of another time. Ancestors, who call these questions forward, are the very disturbance of meaning, of closure. They are an opening onto the underlying void. Who is an ancestor? Which ancestors show up? Along the flow of the poem is the dissonance, the distortion of the frayed thread of identity that calls back to Gould’s assurances to Miranda about the persistence of connections through absence as well as to her own anxieties about being raised without her Native culture. It is an Indigenizing of death and of the difficult relations most California Indians have in their ancestral lines conditioned by genocide. In Gould’s poem ancestors arrive in a phantasmagoric manner, almost as signs of their origins, arriving briefly without becoming “real.” They fracture the real, opening onto another world that isn’t this one. Only in the Creator’s absence, an absence as well as a plurality—creation being always a matter of multiple beings—can ancestors return in such a manner, without the fullness of being, without the leaden weight of western meaning and its logocentric god. California Indian relations to the Creator tend toward a certain godlessness.

Echoing Miranda’s difficult “homecoming” in Bad Indians, land and place appear in the poem in the uncertainty of time, July / or September. Though strung along a string of moments, the long thread of the poem offers a series of instantaneous events in incredibly vivid detail, yet tenuous, sweet. The freshness of matter-of-fact descriptions in brief, abbreviated form, blue sky above, / far off cloud, / white and puffy, / wind in treetops, / a grosbeak calling, / river rushing by / over hard stones, almost a list, offers an image without settling, without its fully taking shape, conditioning the (non)arrival of the ancestors. Non-Indigenous ancestors are “yonder,” within eyesight but full of that infinite distance that vision, time, and genocidal histories produce, marked by the out-of-placeness, the formality, of the term “yonder.” An intimate distance. The poem forgoes judgment and commentary, just describes these other ancestors, white colonizers, in succession, a parade of sorts, of scenes of everyday music and dancing, Great-grandfather Beatty / produces a fiddle / and begins a jig, / while the Frenchman, / Orcier, claps, / tapping his sabots / on the rock, / ooh-la, c’est / magnifique! All except the English, who arrive without music, late-comers / with ruddy faces / and upright postures, / carting among them / bricks and mortar, / insurance forms, a whiff / of superiority, no judgment, still matter-of-fact. It is a mixed-blood genealogy that dissipates the violence of form, liberates language from the rhetorical labor of meaning-making and capture, collapses an entire genocidal history into an instantaneous moment, for the parade is all at once. There is something a bit carnivalesque about it without the spectacle, without the heavy political meaning of “the people” at odds with the ruling class. While seemingly offering up a scene of afterlife relations, it throws off the shackles of expectations, of Native “spirituality,” of critical form. Recalling that Miranda initiated this conversation between poems with a conditional under the sign of dream, If your body wakes you, / if night is a restless dream / wondering / what’s to come, is Gould’s poem a dream? It has the intensity, the strangeness and vividness, of a fever dream, somewhere between waking and sleep, mind and body in intense, inextricable interaction. Is she dancing in a circle without moving? Going everywhere and nowhere all at once? Has her body brought her into the presence of the ancestors through dreaming? What speaks through the poem?

The poem ends on two notes: a reunion with her parents, marked by the dissolving of a terrible longing to see them again, they are holding hands / and smiling at the first / of their daughters / to arrive home / safely, no judgment, / just happiness, / and I stand, tears / streaming down my face / to greet them, and an analogy, like the sudden / gust of warm air that / fingers my black hair - / and departs. The distance of time and the terrible longing rhymes these two notes. And I cannot help but hear the resonance between fingers my black hair—marking a time shift perhaps based on age—and Gould’s description of the road trip that she took with Miranda decades earlier, Her hand on my thigh, my shoulder, / in my hair. The brevity of their relationship, the distance of space and time, and the sudden (re)emergence, then and now, like a gust of warm air, (re)activates a certain loneliness, a terrible longing, that existed before the speaker even knew these feelings were there and that continues as a mode of difficult sociality, only dissipating along the feather road, along the infinite path, what some might call the moment of death.

In these two poems, the ancestral relationship is a form of study, a practiced exercise in writing the word “ancestors,” together. Miranda begins her poem with the conditional if-then and gives assurance of the presence of ancestors, erases distance, eliciting the questions Gould opens her poem with, the uncertainty of their presence, of who or what they are, and her reinstating of distance. In conversation, Miranda’s and Gould’s poems produce an unsettled relation, unresolved, finding resolution through irresolution. Inverting the question and answer exercise, Miranda answers, though in the form of the conditional, before Gould asks the question. Are ancestors near? If your body wakes you, ancestors are near. Miranda’s invitation to uncertainty is taken up by Gould with questions that anticipate and challenge Miranda’s answer followed by the fleeting images of nonanswers. Together Miranda and Gould exercise the word “ancestors,” the ancestral relation, flexing and releasing, past the point of meaning. No resolution, no absence of resolution; a different kind of carrying on happens in this conversation, a collaborative praxis that jams the colonial language and empties it. The gust of warm air is anything but spirit. In a sense, it is everything not spirit. Some kinds of love / are older than blood.