Listen to authors Deborah A Miranda and Sasha LaPointe discuss the power of native culture-keeping through memoir and celebrate the 10-year anniversary and special edition of Deborah’s memoir
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Described as a “classic, quintessentially Indigenous memoir,” by former U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo, Miranda’s mosaic memoir has inspired a new generation of Indigenous readers, writers, and culture-keepers through its creative and perceptive excavation of archives—from the historical to the personal—and the dauntless truth-telling her explorations yield. Hers is a story that has gained only more momentum with time. Widely adopted in classrooms and reading groups across the country,
Bad Indians ranked among the most circulated books in the San Francisco Public Library a decade after its original debut and was celebrated as a California Book Club pick in 2023.
Deborah will be signing the new 10-year anniversary edition of
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir after the presentation. Copies of her book will be available at the museum for purchase. This is a free event and welcomes visitors of all ages. Light refreshments will be served. This program is made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services
Inspire! Grant for Small Museums.
10 Year (and Counting) of Bad Indians
March 23 | 7:00pm
Doors open at 6:30pm
at the Maidu Museum & Historic Site
1970 Johnson Ranch Dr.
Featuring speakers:
Deborah A. Miranda an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. Deborah lives in Eugene, Oregon with her wife, writer Margo Solod. She is Professor of English emerita at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing as the Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Endowed Chair. Her mixed-genre memoir
Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir received the 2015 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award. She is also the author of four poetry collections:
Indian Cartography,
The Zen of La Llorona,
Raised by Humans, and
Altar for Broken Things.
Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. Native to the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city. She writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for the Lushootseed language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage. Her memoir
Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk was published by Counterpoint Press on March 8, 2022. Her collection of poetry,
Rose Quartz was published by Milkweed in Spring, 2023. In her 2023 article for Publishers Weekly she cited Miranda’s
Bad Indians as one of the Native authored-texts that inspired her.