Newly expanded, this gripping memoir is hailed as essential by the likes of Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and ELLE magazine. 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 for its 10th anniversary—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 anniversary 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 telling of American history. Alta Journal California Book Club Pick 2023 Winner, PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Literary Award Winner, 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award, Gold Medal for Autobiography/Memoir Shortlisted for the 2014 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing " Bad Indians is the sacred text and story of California, the book that sits beside me when I write, the book I have given to all of my daughters, the book I give to people I love when they need to know the deeply-sung truths and revelations of this state, of this world. Deborah Miranda writes of hundreds of years of children, parents, love and despair and love again, here in a land beloved and stolen and cherished. With tenderness and fiercely lyrical beauty, she takes apart myth and resurrects the branches of her own trees, as no one else ever could."— Susan Straight , author of Mecca and In the Country of Women " Bad Indians stands out as a classic quintessentially Indigenous memoir. It is a powerful text that demonstrates, through a merging of personal storytelling, history, and gathering of testimony, a meta-story of generational trauma and triumph. It is the best book of its kind and will continue to be an essential text in California, national, and world history."— Joy Harjo "In Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir , we learn about the Indigenous people of California from the 16th century to the present. What was and is day-to-day life for them? How much has been erased from our history books? How do we begin to dispel the myth that Native Americans are a people of the past? We start here."— Brea Baker, ELLE magazine "A desperately needed correction to centuries of fantasy and whitewashing. [...] Miranda's dialogic kit is rich and deep, and it uses archival aesthetics to create a story that is as full of information and lacunae as California history itself. Accepting that some parts of her family's past will never be retrievable gives Miranda the chance to allow readers to appreciate how much was destroyed in the history of contact between California's Native tribes and the Mexican and European settlers who came to establish the mission system." — John Freeman " Bad Indians serves as a vital, eloquent corrective to the dominant narrative of California. [...] This is a vibrant tapestry of a text, an assemblage of poetry, oral history, prayer, visual collage, memoir, elegy, and personal testimony. [...] How will we change the story of California? With what Native-led texts can we begin? It is our unearned fortune that Miranda asks these challenging questions and directs us to the languages and stories with which to answer them." — S. M. Sukardi, Alta Journal "I teach this book to my students in every creative nonfiction class and am excited by it every time. It is a powerful example of how memoir can be what we want it to be. This is a fearless and beautiful book."— Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe , author of Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk "In Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir  [...] Deborah A. Miranda rightly insists on putting together the voices of her people and a critique of the mythology that required them to submit to an unequal structure, even in the telling of their own stories." — Anita Felicelli , author of Chimerica "I am all for dunking on the mission system because fuck that noise (and if you’re not convinced/unaware of this nasty part of California history, please read the book Bad Indians , by Deborah Miranda)." — Kali Simmons, Vulture "For anyone and everyone who likes to listen to and tell stories and who believes in the liberating power of story."— Jonah Raskin , Anderson Valley Advertiser "Throughout Bad Indians , Miranda employs an array of strategies: writing letters and reproducing images, sharing poems and documents. It’s all a way to create territory for the many voices that have been effaced. The