Decolonizing Pedagogies: Tools for Disrupting the California Narrative with "Bad Indians"

Location

Knauss Center for Business Education, 114/116 (Nexus Theater)

Free

Full Description

We use words like decolonize, disrupt, genocide, racism, missionization, de-centering and a multitude of similar words in the classroom on a regular basis, but teaching Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir moves the discussion from theory to reality in ways that are effective, but deeply complex. Non-native students have commented on the stark portrayals of Indigenous trauma as almost overwhelming, express anger that they have never been taught this history, and often experience a kind of paralysis regarding their own complicity and yes, "white guilt." Indigenous professors have stated that they love the text, but find it personally difficult to teach given their own tribal histories. Native and non-native professors want to know if they should post trigger warnings in their syllabi, how to address student resistance to this relatively new perspective on California missions and want ways to provide context about historical trauma without perpetuating Indigenous Californians as victims in need of rescue by white saviors. 

In this talk, I use my conversations and correspondence with university faculty as well as my own 10+ years of experience engaging with readers to suggest pedagogical possibilities that enrich classroom discussion, and utilize the book to its fullest potential. These strategies may be mapped onto similar texts as well.

Intended Audience: All USD faculty, admin/staff and graduate students.

Speaker Biography

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. She is also a Two Spirit mother, grandmother, auntie and wife. Born at UCLA hospital in 1961, she was transplanted to rural Western Washington State at the age of five, carving out her childhood in trailer courts, wild meadows, on gravel roads and Pacific Northwest forests. When her father was released from San Quentin, he rejoined the family and gave Deborah a crash course in California Indian 101, bringing her up to date on all the historical trauma and ancestral connections that required. Her father’s brilliant storytelling skills, along with her own fierce resistance to erasure, ultimately led Deborah into writing and then higher education as a professor of English, specializing in Native American literatures and creative writing. She calls that episode of life “acts of reverse-missionization and decolonization in the belly of the beast.” Deborah’s hybrid project, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Literary Prize. In 2022, the 10th anniversary edition of Bad Indians was released as a hardback with 50+ additional pages of material. Miranda is also the author of four poetry collections (Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things) and co-editor of the Lambda finalist Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature. Deborah’s current projects include a collection of essays based on the stories of Isabel Meadows, an Indigenous culture-bearer born in 1846 in the aftermath of the San Carlos Mission in Carmel, California, and “When Mission Walls Talk,” which deconstructs the glossy coffee table books sold in mission gift shops that function as genocidal propaganda against the lives of California Indians whose ancestors were consumed by those colonizing machines. Now retired from full-time teaching, Deborah is also completing a poetry collection titled maxana chempapisi: Blood Writing. She and spouse Margo Solod now live on the shores of the Willamette River in Eugene, Oregon at River Song Cohousing.