Bad Indians (Expanded Edition)

Now in paperback and newly expanded, this gripping memoir is hailed as essential by Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and ELLE magazine—among others.

Bad Indians—part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir—is essential reading for anyone seeking to learn about California Indian history, past and present. Widely adopted in classrooms and book clubs throughout the United States, Bad Indians—now reissued in significantly expanded form—plumbs ancestry, survivance, and the cultural memory of Native California.

In this best-selling, now-classic memoir, Deborah A. Miranda tells stories of her Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family and the experiences of California Indians more widely through oral histories, newspaper clippings, anthropological recordings, personal reflections, and poems. This expanded edition includes several new poems and essays, as well as an extensive afterword, totaling more than fifty pages of new material. Wise, indignant, and playful all at once, Bad Indians is a beautiful and devastating read, and an indispensable book for anyone seeking a more just and accurate telling of American history.

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. In addition to Bad Indians, she is the author of four poetry collections and coeditor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. She earned her PhD in English literature from the University of Washington in Seattle and was Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing. She retired from her professorship in 2021 to focus on scholarship and poetry involving California Mission history and literatures. She and her spouse, writer Margo Solod, live in Eugene, Oregon, a short distance from homelands in California.