California Indians Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

California is the golden state: a land of Malibu suntans, Hollywood, Disneyland, and of recent, the Silicon Valley kingdom where Apple, Yahoo, and Facebook reign supreme. The draw of the Pacific Coast, the fertile San Joaquin valley, and the numerous frothy rivers that flow from Sierra Nevada ice-caps, have long summoned settlers seeking wealth and sunshine. Yet swept beneath tiny granules of California sand and contemporary cloverleaf highways of asphalt lies a covert past of massacre, rape, and domination that led to one of the most devastating Genocides witnessed by man (Madley 449; Lobo, Talbot, & Morris 140). Decades of exploitation, discrimination, and de-humanization are part of a little-known, suppressed California history which led to the near-destruction of the Indigenous California population. It was a near-destruction so complete that Native Californians still struggle to reconfigure the devastation and fragmentation of their Indigenous Californian heritage. Deborah Miranda and Wendy Rose, two descendants of California Indigenous tribes, have embarked on a quest to re-build, re-claim and re-define their (Native) place in the world. It is a quest that defies the very structure of colonialization. Both are generations removed from California-of-old, and its once-vibrant Indigenous culture filled with spirit and life; yet both wield a power through pen, through poetry and prose. Moreover, both Rose and Miranda provide an Indigenous perspective to California’s recorded history that challenges the implied premise of “savages” and “bad Indians,” inspiring all-around understanding and inciting change. Through their poetry, their literature, and their reflections of the past, in Bad Indians and Bone Dance, Deborah Miranda and Wendy Rose respectively re-write and re-create California’s fragmented indigenous past, one fragment at a time.