Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

The first line of the book’s introduction describes California as both “a story” and “many stories” (xi). The final line of the book’s last paragraph refers to “stories worth following home” (208). From start to finish, therefore, the power of stories constitutes a central theme. In fact, Miranda regards story as “the most powerful force in the world—in our world, maybe in all worlds” (xvi).

On one hand, the power of stories is universal. Human beings have always used stories to make sense of existence. Miranda acknowledges that all people, throughout history, have told stories as a way of understanding and shaping reality. On the other hand, story takes on special significance for people whose languages and cultures have vanished. Words, beliefs, habits, and material objects associated with long-ago communities or civilizations can be lost, but stories have the power to survive. Miranda realized this only after watching everyone and everything in her own life disappear, fearing that she too would disappear someday and clinging to her written words as a way of staving off that inevitable disappearance. She eventually came to accept life’s evanescence, learned to “let go of those old journals” that someday would “fade” along with the “ancient petroglyphs of [her] Chumash and Esselen ancestors,” and found comfort in the belief that “stories will never disappear” (122).