 Hello. We're going to give it just a minute to fill up the room. Thank you for joining us on a Friday afternoon. I love it. Welcome, welcome, welcome. All right. And forgive me, I've had high sugar intake today. Little hyped up. I'm going to put in the chat box today's links to library events, library news, links to our presenter and links to their website, their social media, and to their books in our collection, as well as a link to the YouTube recording of this. So you can watch again or share with your friends and family. Okay, we're going to give it a few more minutes. Let it fill up. Hello, everyone. All right, I'm going to get started with today's library announcements. First off, again, thank you so much for being here today on a Friday afternoon and spending some time with your public library, the San Francisco Public Library. And I want to thank Deborah Miranda for joining us today as well. And we are celebrating our November, December on the same page. Selected book, bad Indians on the same page is a bimonthly read. And the books are chosen, nominated and chosen by our readers advisory committee. This book campaign has been going on for 17 years. So we are really proud of the work we do here and we read a lot of books and we're really honored to have. Deborah Miranda and bad Indians for November and December. And you can get that book right now at your local library, or your favorite independent bookstore, or from Hay Day Books website. And we love Hay Day. We've had a lot of Hay Day authors in November and December. They're amazing partners. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the limited ancestral homeland of the Ram Yutush Sholoni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ram Yutush community. And right now, if you also know what native land you're from, you can put that in the chat box. If you don't know, you can use this amazing map. And then we also have a website, I mean a resource and reading list, which has, of course, lots of books, but also lots of websites, particularly for Bay Area folks. Segurte Land Trust is one of our favorites. Women-led land right advocates. So check them out. Give them some money. Donate. It's Christmas time. Or whatever you celebrate. All right. So just some quick library updates and news. Like I said, what we have some upcoming events on Saturday. We're celebrating the 77th year of the Nutcracker. And we're doing so by having the inspired Nutcracker inspired chair dance again. We did this last year and via Zoom. And I thought it was going to be silly. And it was indeed silly, but super fun and silly. And it was really just so great to see everybody having that fun and joining together. There's also an oral history of the Nutcracker. On January 24th, we'll be celebrating our San Francisco's own Zizava Arts and Letters Journal. In operation since 1984. Amazing people. And we'll be having four authors from the issue number 122, the inter-transnational issue. So please come check that out, spend some time. And invest in San Francisco's literary community. All right. So again, without much else, I'm very excited and thankful that Deborah Miranda has agreed to be with us this fine December. And hopefully you have read the book. If not, you still have time. You can get it at all of our libraries. Like I said, on Monday evening, this coming up Monday, we'll have a book club where we can all gather and talk about the book. And Deborah will not be at the book club, but I will be. Deborah Miranda is an enrolled member of the Eloni Coastanoan Esalon Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. Her mixed genre book, Bad Indians, a tribal memoir out on Hey Day, received the 2015 Penn Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a gold medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was shortlisted for the William Soroyan Literary Award. She is also the author of four poetry collections, Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorna, Raised by Humans, and Alter for Broken Things. She's the co-editor of Sovereign Erotics, a collection of two-spirit literature. Deborah lives in Lexington, Virginia with her wife, Margo, and a variety of rescue dogs. She is the Thomas H. Broaddus Jr. Professor of English, or she was, we shall say, retired at Washington and Lee University. I am so excited to have her here and be in conversation with Deborah. I'm going to stop sharing and it'll be us. Welcome, Deborah. Thank you so much, Anissa. It's a pleasure to be here. Hi, thank you so much. All right, I'm going to pull up my other document of questions. So first off, thank you. The book is amazing. It's poignant, poetic, creative, and just, it's raw, painful, very honest, just stunning. And, you know, I'll put this out here too, and I'll put some other resources in the chat box as we go along. But, you know, there could be some trigger warnings for folks. We are talking about generational trauma and abuse and genocide really, right? So please, please be warned. There could be some trigger warnings for folks. So how's retirement treating you? Start there. Let's go with the easy stuff. Easy stuff. Yes, I retired in June. I've been just kind of getting the feel here, but it's been lovely. I've been able to write a lot of poetry and do a lot of family stuff and try to sort of get my brain back. So yeah, retirement, pretty much rocks. Have you always been a poet? I would say yes. I think I started writing stories when I was seven. And by the time I was 10, I was writing poems that rhymed, of course. All right. I think is really such an intimate telling of your family history in which you detail your ancestors and your own trauma and abuse. Tell us how you decided to really write this book and how uncovering of that generational trauma like made its way into the book. And along with that, like your research process for this and the writing process of it. All right. Let's see. In some ways this book came into being because my mother did a lot of genealogical research. And she was not Indigenous. My father was. And I think in some way, because they divorced when I was three under very traumatic circumstances, my father was incarcerated in San Quentin for five years. And my mother kind of had a nervous breakdown. Disappeared for a year. And I went to live with my aunt and uncle. And I think when she came back, she had remarried a man from Washington state and we moved up there. And so I think she always felt a little bad that she had separated me from my Indigenous family in California. And even though it was not a real organized tribe at that point, I had half sisters and aunts and uncles and a lot of cousins. And instead of growing up with them, I grew up in Washington state as always the only Indian kid in the classroom in the neighborhood, you know, whatever. And so at a certain point, my mom got really interested in genealogy and she started, she started doing research on the California mission. Part of the tribes that I was from. And she did this back when, you know, you had to travel to get those records. You had, you know, she had to go down to the San Bruno archives. She had to go to Salt Lake city. She did this all the hard way. And now all of those mission records are online and you can pull them up from your computer at home. But she, and she tried to get me interested. I did do, I did go to some of the archives in Seattle with her. But I was pretty young. I was, you know, 20, 25 years old starting a family. And the past didn't interest me that much as much as my current life did. After my mom passed away when I was 40, that's when I inherited all of this paperwork. And she kept it all on paper. She did have it on computers, but unfortunately that computer was stolen. So I inherited all of the papers and the boxes of stuff. And they were, they were piles and piles of these boxes and I hadn't figured out a place to store them yet. So they were in our bedroom and I started having these crazy dreams. Dreams about the missions, dreams about my ancestors. And finally my wife said, you got to get these boxes out of the house. So I did, I took them to school to my office there. And that was really the start of it. I realized that there were voices that needed to be heard that I needed to listen to some of these. And I, because I'm a researcher, I started doing the background, the historical context of what happened to California Indians, mostly from the central coast down to San Diego, which was the missionized, they were called the missionized tribes. And specifically my own tribe and my own family members. And I really hit the jackpot. When I found in some of my mother's papers, copies from Isabel Meadows stories. And Isabel Meadows was a woman from the Carmel mission. Her dad was English. Her mother was from Indigenous women from the mission. And she worked with an anthropologist slash ethnologist who recorded all of her stories. And a lot of those stories were about my relatives. So I did end up going to UCLA and using their materials to read all of these stories. And started putting together the pieces because a lot of, a lot of times the way the, the stories were written down were fragmented, the stories themselves were fragmented. And I started to realize that there were patterns and that there were particular people who really stood out. And that was the beginning for me was just realizing, oh, these are, these are my relatives. These just aren't some anonymous people. I can, I can look at the family tree and see how we're connected. And that was, that was really powerful. I think I was at the right age. I was in the right state of mind. And then in addition to that, I also had some, my mom had saved some cassette tapes of my grandfather, Tom. And basically him just sitting around with his family telling stories, they would ask him questions he would answer. And I had, I had those put onto CDs so that the, because I was afraid the tapes would break and then transcribed some, my mom had already transcribed others. And realized that, you know, this, this was Tom talking about really important survival techniques. So yeah, it was a, it was a slow start for me. And then once it got started, I couldn't stop. And I realized this is my life's work. What a gift those tapes must be. Wow. That's everything that my mom had was such a gift. And you know, I wish I had known it when she was still alive. She knew it. And I'm really grateful that in her will, she said, you know, my brother got all the stuff in the condo, but I got all the genealogy. She knew she knew someday I would want that stuff. Yeah. Well, she really laid the groundwork. And did she have the photos too, because the book just has some amazing photos of you and your family, as well as, you know, the other drawings and the clippings that you included, but your personal photos are just gorgeous. I love the 70s ones of you. Yes. Some of those came from my mother, some came from my dad. Some I found in the archives. And yeah, just kind of, I lucked out on a lot of them. And just, you know, I don't like to advertise Amazon too much, but this Debra's book is available on Audible and big ups for you doing the photo description in your Audible. Yes. That is so amazing. Really great. I think that just makes so accessible. So we have a family member who has macular degeneration and listens to, she listens to books on tape and all I could think about was I really want Sina to be able to at least know that these pictures are here and what might be there. You did a great job on that. Great job on that. All right. So let's, and I'm going to have a lot, a few questions, but I'm just going to kind of go on what you've said and bounce around. So I have a child in California school systems. And of course he did the fourth grade mission project, which was, you know, deep part of the curriculum here. And, you know, I felt like his instructor, his teacher, you know, did an average okay job of like instructing and telling folks that, you know, I mean, I think he did come out with it realizing that Indians were enslaved and that there was a genocide, but he, they still had to teach it within this curriculum. Right. I'm wondering, you know, I think bad Indians should be required reading and so many grade levels. I think it could, parts of it could be worked even in fourth grade. Some of the stuff that was here could be used. Can you tell us if your book has been used in any, you know, grade school up and on and the curriculum that was, you know, built around it? I don't know for sure about grade school. I do know it's been taught in some middle schools and for sure in high schools. There's a woman in Los Angeles who did a fundraiser to buy a class set. And then she ended up buying two class sets so she could keep one at school and let the students take one home. So there are quite a few high school teachers using it. There's a, I used to, oh, I have it sitting right here. There's a book called Island Visions. And it's really not about California Indians. It's about the islands, the, you know, Catalina and the islands that are off the coast. So it's more of an ecological book, but it does a great, it has a, it included, I think, three or four indigenous, California indigenous people doing various pieces. And the, the something that's not in the book, but it's called an open letter to fourth graders. Dear Sonora, sometimes I call it Dear Sierra. That got included in there. So that was, and that was written specifically for fourth graders. But I think, I don't know about, about teaching it to younger children. I think some of the material could be adapted for fourth graders. But obviously a lot of it's really raw and really difficult. Yeah. And it's not that you can't teach that stuff because we teach slavery and we teach about the Holocaust. And there are children's books about those things, but we really don't have that material yet for California Indians. I think there are a couple of different groups working on a curriculum for California Indians. And some of them are out there already, but you have to know where to look for them. Yeah. And you know, I think children are just. Children today are so savvy. They know, they know that this was so wrong and just, you know, brutal. I think it would be great. I definitely thought high school, this would just resonate so much with folks with kids today. Thank you, Deborah. And I'm just also looking at the chat and folks are like. Lovely on the audible for sure. And the book is really beautiful. You know, imagine it's just such a mix of poetry and creativity and art and it's really great. So yes, pick up the book friends. All right, let's see here. Okay, I'm going to jump to a totally different question. So as a library worker, I was charged with promoting the census 2020. I became very discouraged and disheartened at the whole process. And, you know, I was kind of pumped at first because a lot rides on the census, right? Funding and, you know, funding for people who need the funding. It drove me nuts, but especially in the Trump climate, right? So questions got changed. It's just a mess. The whole 2020 census is a mess. And it's all seemed to me to start being built on the erasure of people. I have never heard of the Kelsey census and you talk about this. Can you tell us about the Kelsey census? Sure. First of all, let me just say the census has almost always never been totally inclusive. And I say this as somebody who does genealogy research and really, I mean, the censuses can contain the most amazing information. If you're counted on the census. So those are, I'm talking about the big U.S. Census that happens every 10 years. And I've gotten a lot of good information out of them, but I've also just wanted to bring people's next because I know people were there and they weren't included. But the Kelsey census was a very specific, native census that was done at the behest of the BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs to or whoever it was at that point, it might not have even existed. But to find out as part of a larger context, were there still California Indians in the Carmel Monterey, Big Sur Pacific Grove area, because that was kind of where we had spread out and to get into solitude. And if there were, we were supposed to be assigned land or given a payment of some kind. So it was, and this was very, very late in the game, long after, you know, most of the genocide had happened. So long story short, the people in charge of doing the census did a really crappy job and they did not work very hard at it. There are some letters back and forth with the person doing the census, you know, saying, yeah, I went out there and looked around. I wasn't feeling very well. I didn't see any Indians. And so the upshot was that the Estlin tribe did not, was not able to have any land of our own. And became what people call a landless tribe. And they basically said there aren't enough of them left to count. They don't matter, in other words, because there's just a few of them left. And also because of missionization, or considered some kind of tame Indians, you know, because if we weren't wild Indians, then we weren't really Indians, right? Because Indians are supposed to be wild and untamed and all this stuff, but we were quote unquote, sort of civilized, right? And so, you know, we were, you know, we were, you know, we spoke Spanish, went to church, dressed in, you know, western clothing, new, had various kinds of occupations that were, you know, useful to the larger society. So yeah, just that was the census that pretty much did that big act of erasure. And then, you know, at 1900, maybe, Alfred Krober declared us the first tribe in California to become extinct. And then 20 years later, he realized he was wrong and he, you know, made it clear I was wrong. There is still a tribe and a culture left. And at that point the damage had been done. So his reassessment didn't have any effect on our legal status. So what we are now is known as a federally unrecognized tribe. And if you are not federally recognized, you don't have the right to any land. You don't have the right to Indian health services. You don't have the right to, if you're a high school student, apply for scholarships that are for Indigenous students, because you have to be a federally recognized Indigenous student to apply for those. So there's a lot of things, not to mention you can't apply for grants to do language reclamation or anything like that. So there's a lot of problems with being unrecognized. Yes. Thank you. Let's see. Maybe I'll jump to, I see there's questions already from our audience. Maybe I'll jump around and ask some audience questions at the time here. Can you talk about what was the hardest thing for you to do in writing this book? What doubts or concerns did you have as you wrote? And this is a, let's see. And how well did the editing process from finding the publisher? This is a long question. Writing process, getting your book done and satisfaction to support your work, which, you know, so I would say let's tackle that first part. It's a two-parter. Two-parter. Can you talk about what the hardest thing for you was to do in writing this book? Wow. Much of the book was written during a 10 month period when I was on sabbatical. I had gotten a fellowship at UCLA to come and research there. And so I was living in a little studio apartment in Westwood, which is where I was born. I was born at UCLA hospital. So traveling about a mile every day up to UCLA to work. I got into kind of a cave mentality where I just dove into the research and I would research and research for a couple of weeks and then I would write and write and write and then research and research and research. And the material that I was reading and finding was really traumatic. You know, it was about deaths and killings of Indians, trauma within the mission, trauma for women, for children. The difficulties of being an indigenous man. So I think reading these stories and taking them in and realizing, oh, these are my relatives. Feeling maybe for the first time in my life truly, truly connected to what had happened during the California mission genocide. And I think probably one of the stories that there are two stories that that probably hit me the hardest. One was that I kept following one man through the birth, through the baptism, baptismal records, marriage records, and then death records in the mission books. And I also found lots of material that the priests had written letters they wrote back and forth records they kept and his name kept coming up over and over again as a bad Indian. Juan Nepomacino is a bad Indian. He stole cattle. He stole from the mission stores. He did this, he did that. And then I would find, and I kept thinking, wow, he really is a bad Indian. And then I started finding in the death records, the deaths of his children, one after another, after another. And remember that the Catholic Church encouraged these people to have huge families. So women were giving birth like every year. And they were giving birth to children and only one survived. So there was this constant death happening. And some, you know, what showed up over and over again in the notes was that, oh, this baby died or this child died of malnutrition. And I realized, oh, this guy is stealing cattle and stealing food from the stores so he can feed his family. And he keeps getting punished for it. That was one of those moments. And it was hard, but it was also an aha moment. Like there is something going on with this praise, bad Indians and what they're doing is actually survival. So that was really tough because it just, it just really hit me that every move they made to survive, they were thwarted. And then the second thing that was really hard was finding this thing called the interregatorio. My Spanish is terrible, but it's a, it's a list of questions that the Catholic authorities in Mexico sent up to all the missions. And the priests wrote answers. So it was like a, in a way a kind of census and things were like, how do they raise their children? What are their marriages like? Are they, do they go to church? Do they know their prayers? Do they, do they have sex? Do they masturbate? You know, all these questions that would, that got asked of these Indians during confession. And you could see the progression of violence at first. These Indians had never known corporal punishment and they had never struck their children. They had never known it and they'd never done it to their children. And so they were being flogged with a cat of nine tails for things like not speaking Spanish or leading the mission to go gather food or, you know, some very simple basic things. And they were told, you have to start disciplining your children. And they were like, we can't do that. So then the, the priests would say, well, then send them to the soldiers and the soldiers will punish them. And so the parents actually started doing this, right? And so they were like, well, they're going to punish them because they would be punished if they didn't. And eventually you can see the parents, the, the priests saying. Now the parents finally do send their children. And then, you know, now the parents are themselves punishing the children. So you have in my mind, this very clear. Kind of weird. And so they were like, you know, they're going to punish the Spanish and the soldiers and the punishing. And the priests and then moves on to the parents saying, okay, please punish my child. I can't do it. And then finally the parents being able to do it themselves. And connecting that to the violence in my family. The whippings that my father gave his children. That was incredibly disturbing. To see where. That had started. You know, to see where we were going. You know, there was so much a part of our culture. That we had literally been taught. How to be violent with each other. Those were probably the two most difficult things in terms of writing the book, how to write that, right? How do. That's why I ended up doing things like drawing genealogies of violence. You know, there were some things I couldn't put in. To a poem or I couldn't put into an essay. It needed to be something else. I don't know what to even call them. Yeah. The relationship with your father. Super intense. Wow. And. Thank you for writing that. And I know, you know, just when, when. When people do write about abuse in their family. I think, you know, it's triggering, but I also think that it's so liberating for people who are reading it to just. To have that connection and not feel alone because, you know, obviously. Lots of people are abused. And I just want to thank you again for writing it because I know you. It would allow people to connect just to something deeper. And that same thing. I have to say that that is. One of the main things that other California Indians talked to me about. And they say, you know, this is, this is my dad. This is my father. This is my grandfather. This is what happened in my family. And I think. When I was writing the book and staying in California for that year, I went to a lot of native gatherings, a lot of Californian and gatherings. And I would usually read at them stuff that was pretty new and raw because I wanted to know, you know, is this okay with my community? Can you know this, some communities might think that I'm airing dirty laundry and the overwhelming response was thank you for telling this. I wish I could have said that. And there's a kind of release in that. A sense of knowing you're not alone. In a sense of. This is not something to be ashamed of. You know, we didn't make this happen. This happened to us. Why should we, why should we feel ashamed of this? Yeah. And your father too. I mean, you know, this has happened to him. You know, it's just like a horrible cyclical thing. I think intergenerational trauma. But the theory of it really helped me understand my father. It didn't make me able to forgive. The kinds of violence that he visited on his wives and children. But it did allow me to understand how that came into the world. And that's something that's a big something. So now people and folks are like looking at an educating and working even in a work environment are looking at more like dealing with life and work in a trauma kind of informed lens. And as SEL, the social emotional learning approach. What do you think of all of those? Well, you know, there's a great book out there called therapeutic nations. By Diane million, who's at the Baskin and a professor at the University of Washington. And she takes on the idea of intergenerational trauma and that social emotional kind of. Gestalt and the idea of therapy, right? And one of the things that she says is that it's really historical trauma theory is really important because it helps us make those connections and see why what happened happened. But it's also really important to know that. Most of the time, if we go to therapy, we're getting therapy with a European. American. Culture behind it. And indigenous people have our own ways of coping and healing and processing. And that it's really important not to medical eyes. Trauma that it's it is something that is very much in the felt experience. So I think it's really, I think it is really crucial that we acknowledge that emotional. Trauma is information. It's knowledge. It's a way of knowing the world. And that there are indigenous responses to that. I personally have been in therapy with a wonderful therapist for about eight years. He's not indigenous. But he is incredible because he gets that he gets that it's the emotional component. So yeah, that's I think it's really important, but I also think it's important not to fall into the. Fall into the trap of thinking, well, white people can just fix this with therapy or with, you know, mental health. You know, funding or whatever. It's much more, we need much more than that. And a lot of it means we need to reconnect with ourselves, each other and our culture. Thank you. Thank you. Can I also talk about that second half of that question? Sure. I probably had the best experience that any author could ever have with heyday. When I was working on this book, I was in touch with Malcolm Margolin, who was then the publisher. Yeah. Malcolm. He is the man. And at a certain point I sent it to him and he wrote back and he said, you know, some of this stuff is pretty good, but a lot of it feels like it's just straight off your blog. It's not a book yet. Keep working on it. And I was like, okay, you know, I'm kind of crushed, but at the same time encouraged. And so I worked on it for another year. And I sent it first to another big university publisher. And they had it for a year and didn't do anything. I kept bugging them and bugging them. And finally they came back and told me that marketing told them it wasn't marketable. I went straight back to heyday with my big polished manuscript, which I had laid out. I literally did the layout myself because I knew exactly where I wanted every picture, every graphic, everything. And I said, here it is. And Malcolm was like, oh my God. And everyone at heyday read that manuscript. Everyone, not just the editors, not just the designers, the people who did the shipping of books. I mean, this manuscript made the rounds. And I got so much great feedback and so much support and so much guidance because this was my first big book. And when I literally walked in the door at heyday later, everybody knew me. It was amazing. So it was a rough start. And I knew that it would be because even as I was starting to write this book and I saw all the different things I was putting in it, how it was multi, you know, different genres. I thought, who the heck is going to publish this, you know? So I found the best home. And I have to say that heyday has already contacted me about a 10th anniversary edition of the book as the 10th anniversary is coming up. And we're going to expand it a little bit. And I'm going to add something in the, you know, an afterward. And they're just amazing. So yeah, when you find the right publisher, it feels so good. Yes, I can't say enough about heyday either. I mean, I just, they're such amazing library supporters. And I had that opportunity to meet Malcolm. I was a huge fan girl. He's just, he's an amazing human being. And heyday is just, it's fair they do such amazing work. We recently had Tony Platt out on his book, Grave Matters on the re-release of that book. And, you know, when I read about in your book, the Smithsonian collector, you know, I would thought about Tony a lot and just how the deep, deep hoarding that Berkeley does, does with Indian remains. Yeah. Intense, just intense. And just like the, the, I mean, when you talk about the, I'm blanking on the Smithsonian guy, JP. Harrington. Yes. It just felt like, you know, he has this right. Just this official right to be collecting on behalf of the Smithsonian. So terrible. So tragic. And how many remains are sitting in, in Berkeley and all over, you know, in institutions all over the place. Okay. There's some more questions coming in from our friends. Let's, um, let's ask their questions instead of mine. Let's see. Of course there's people who want you to read and yes, Deborah is going to read. Okay. So. Be rest assured. Um, we have an interesting question in the Q and a function, which we sort of talked about prior to us opening, which is, um, what do you, what's your reaction to our land acknowledgement? Oh, interesting. Cause we did have a discussion about that. Um, I recommend to everyone this, I'm going to put it back in the chat again. Um, I'm going to start with this video by catch a wrestling Baldy, um, which is, um, a really great discussion and teaching lesson on how to do. A land acknowledgement. In a way that makes it meaningful and. Effects change. Which I think most of us don't think about. We think, oh, a land acknowledgement. Even just the, the name acknowledgement, I don't think we're on this land. People are still on this land. But the way that Kacha teaches it, um, you try to take, you try to take that opportunity. Not only are you acknowledging the land, but you're acknowledging that there's work to do. And that all of us can help with that work. And she discusses how she pauses. When she gives a land acknowledgement and she previously has researched something that might be important to the tribal people on the land that she is speaking on. And so she will have information ready and she will say, okay, you know, look at my watch. Um, let's take five minutes. I'm going to give you a website. Everybody go there and donate. Um, everybody go there and, you know, sign this petition. Um, she finds something, some kind of action that people can take and she gives them time to do it. And she will just wait. She was just looking at my watch. I'm just waiting for five minutes. I'm just waiting for five minutes. Have you all done it yet? Um, and I really love that. And I have tried to emulate that whenever possible. So, um, I think that's probably one thing that you could improve on with your land acknowledgement is maybe every time you give it, you find a different thing that people can go and support or read or learn about. So, yeah, um, I think land acknowledgements can become performative pretty quickly. And I also think there's a great anecdote for that, which is find something, find an action to take and pass it on. Thank you. The audience. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. And you know, I'll be first to make it does, you know, I do these YouTube zoom things a lot. Um, it is easy to jump into being performative. So thank you so much for that advice. And I will definitely watch that. So let's see. Um, we have a couple more questions in the crowd. I like this method. Um, you've already spoken so beautifully about the emotional landscape of the archive and it's many complex effects. But can you speak a little more about the political potentials of the archive? In other words, what does the archive do or what might be done with the archive, especially marginalized scholars given how much historical harm the archives have been complicit in. That's a great question. It really is. It's complex because I think that this person is absolutely right that the archives have been used as a way to erase or to discredit or to misrepresent indigenous. History, cultures and people. And yet what I found was that it can also work otherwise when there is an indigenous person doing that research. And bringing in other kinds of research for context. So when you contextualize what you find in the archives, for example, when you realize that one, Nipah Masano is constantly being punished because he's trying to feed his starving children because the mission is not able to provide enough food because they are causing women to have too many children, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then you begin to create a story that is much more expansive, tells much more truth. And also like we were saying earlier gets to an emotional core that is often missing from the voices in the archive, the white historians who create most of this material. A lot of times the archives speak about indigenous peoples as if we didn't have any emotions, as if we were somehow a kind of so primitive that we didn't have nerve endings, you know, as if 50 lashes wouldn't totally wipe somebody out and cause them to get infected and die, right? And not to mention the emotional trauma of seeing that happen to your loved one or being the person that it happened to. So one of the things that I think indigenous researchers can bring to those archives is that emotional content that is also has as a foundation our own sort of felt experience of what has happened in our own families and our own communities. So it's a really complex question and one that I really wrestled with when I was doing this research because I had thought when I did this, when I did this book, I was thinking this was going to be the scholarly book that would give me tenure, you know, and then all of this other stuff started to come out and I thought, holy crap, this is not quote unquote scholarly, but I couldn't stop writing it because it was so powerful. And that's when I began to realize that the archives could work for me instead of against me because instead of just gushing and feeling really emotional and saying this was horrible and blah, blah, blah, it's really toxic, it's really traumatic, I could actually say, oh, let's look at these horrible traumatic episodes and talk about the context to them and talk about, you know, intergenerational trauma and give it the kind of presentation that was actually informative instead of just dry history that was really destructive to Indigenous people. So, and I don't think that Indigenous people are the only ones who can do this, but I do think that we come from a particular place that makes that really possible. I think you're muted. Thank you. You mentioned, yes, that it's not 100% scholarly and your work, your writing, there's just some sentences that you have that are just so stunningly written and beautiful and I'd love to read one right now. This is you talking about your brother Al and you and you say, we were like young green plants that could never take the root we desired straight up towards the sun, but grew bent and gnarled, controlled with the effort of evading an obstacle that kept moving. That is so beautiful. It's stunning that you put this in an academic book, right, and the mix of poetry and that kind of writing just makes it like I almost want to cry right now. You know, I know I've made this comparison in my mind before, but I've never hearing somebody else read that makes me realize that that's also, I mean, that could be an Indigenous voice from the missions speaking as well. And that is the kind of resonance that I see between what happened in the 17 and early 1800s and what was happening to me and my brother in the 1970s, right, like 100, 200 years later. This is still the same thing, right. And it was like our trailer was another kind of mission. And our father was another kind of oppressor and yet he was one of us too. And that's where the real emotional damage happens. Yeah, yeah. So I think my training as a poet served me well. But even then there were times when words just didn't work and I resorted to drawings and designs and, you know, different things than I had ever done before because there are some things you just can't say with language. Yeah, I'm intrigued still by the language and your journaling and how you use that as like a piece of therapy for yourself. How much of your journaling is included in this book that you did like prior to your other works towards prior to like sovereign erotic and all of that. Is that included in bad Indians? I think a lot of things in bad Indians started as journaling. I would be in that little studio with all of this research in my head and all of this genealogy and all of this information and all of these feelings. And I would just sit down and start to write about it. And something that started out as a journal, me trying to figure out, you know, what can I do with this material? This is a crazy story. And then I would start bringing in all the material that I had and eventually I would switch to, okay, now I know what I'm going to write. I move away from the journal and I start creating the piece. Excuse me. So yes, I think a lot of stuff started in journals. That's pretty much where I do all of my thinking. It's a great spot. It's a great place to just kind of sort out and sort through. A lot of material. Thank you, Deborah. I think we should allow you some reading time. That's what folks are also wanting. So, okay, let's turn it over and I'm going to mute myself. Okay. So I had a couple that I wanted to read because they're both pretty short. And that, yeah, so I can find this little one. No matter how many times I read from this book, I never know exactly where something is. There we go. All right. So this one is called lies my ancestors told for me. And this did come right out of research and out of family history out of oral stories from my grandfather, my dad and my sister's. When is a lie the truth? When is the truth a lie? When a lie saves your life. That's true. When a lie saves the lives of your children, grandchildren and five generations forward. That's truth in a form so pure. It can't be anything but a story. After the mission broke up. It was better to lie like a dog about blood. It was better to lie like a dog about blood. Say you are Mexican, Mexican, Mexican, Mexican, put it on the birth certificates, put it on the death certificates. Tell it to the census takers. Tell it to the self appointed bounty hunters who appear at your door looking for Indians, Indians, Indians. And when you tell that lie. Tell it in Spanish. In Spanish. In Spanish by María Ignacia Dolores Faustino, lies that deflect genocide. So tell them loudly at the baptismal font in the old mission to the Indian agent, collecting bodies for the boarding school at Riverside, broadcast the names in the street like wheat when you call your Mexican children in at dusk for a bite of a coin mush. like a poor white woman, in other words, a Mexican, where their heavy aprons, high-necked Muslim dresses, and shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes. Shame your grandchildren when they run around barefoot. What are you, an Indian, and stand silent, approving when Digger becomes their favorite slur to hurl at the youngest, the awkward, the slow, the dark. Don't tell them you still speak Chumash with their mother. That's a lie your descendants will hate you for, but lie anyway so there'll be a lie to complain. Grandfathers lie about where you're going when you slip out at night in your dancing clothes, from the hiding place, drive up unlit roads to a rancheria in the hills where clappers and rattles whisper the truth and bear Indian feet beat against the earth, beat, beat, beat like children begging to be lit back inside. Don't teach old songs to your grandchildren. Don't make the regalia in front of them. Don't dance where young eyes might see. Sing the alavada where the priests can hear hum the dear song when they can't. Drag your feet in the dust. Buy a tie for Sundays. Tell the lies now and maybe later your descendants will dig for the truth in libraries, field notes, museums, wax cylinder recordings, newspaper reports of massacres and relocations, clues you left behind when you forgot to lie, lie, lie, lie. And then my last one is one that I wrote at UC Berkeley at the Breath of Life conference, which is a conference for reawakening California tribal languages. It's called Teahami Acheska giving honor for my sister Louise and the Breath of Life conference. I feel you in my blood. In my bones, my gut, my teeth. You rise all around. Return like a lover. My basket, carry me. My ocean, bathe me. I am your hummingbird. You are a flower of the heart. I feel you in my head. My hands, my feet. We dance on the cliff of the world. I feel you in my spine. My throat, my womb. You are a river. I am the rain. It is true. It is true. It is true. My language, our language. Thank you. Oh, that was beautiful. Thank you so much. Friends, we are almost out of time, but you have, you have any final questions for Deborah? Now is the time. And I do see the amazing and beloved Malcolm Margolin in the audience. So thank you, Malcolm, for being here. All right. And the love comes in. Friends, Deborah, thank you so much. We appreciate you being our on the same page author for November and December. Come by on Monday. We can check. We can talk about the book. I mean, not you, Deborah. Deborah will not be at the book club, friends. But friends, library community, come to the book club. We'll discuss the book. It has been an honor, Anisa, and thank you so much for making this happen and giving bad Indians another place in the world. We're going to look forward to that 10th anniversary edition as well. Yeah, me too. All right, friends, big round library community. As always, we love you and thank you and appreciate you being here. Thank you, Deborah.