When Coyote Knocks on the DoorDocumenting Chaos, Archiving Resilience Deborah Miranda (bio) I came into this world already scarred by loss on both sides of my family. My Indigenous side; my European side. My father and my mother were the kind of damaged people who should never have had children. But of course, they had me, and so my first language was loss. * In the eight years since Bad Indians was published—and subsequent essays about my Indigenous Californian Ancestors—I’ve been asked countless times, how long did it take? And, why did you decide to research your own family? First answer: It really depends on how far back you want to go. Sometimes I say, I’ve been doing this work since my first blessed academic sabbatical in 2007–2008. No, since my mother died in 2001 and left me boxes of genealogy and cassette tapes of stories. No, since grad school, circa mid-90s, when I discovered the archives. No, since I fell in love with an Indian woman and learned to love my Indigenous self. No, since I was seven years old, when—after a family ‘friend’ raped me—I wrote my first short story about a family of rabbits shot and killed during ‘hunting season.’ No, I’ve been writing this narrative since I was born into a family of traumatized people. No, since my white grandfather’s mother deserted her two children to escape an abusive and alcoholic spouse in small town Nebraska [settler trauma is real]. No, since my Indigenous Ancestors were taken into Mission San Carlos . . . [End Page 101] How far back does this story go? Too far. * Second answer: Sometimes you lose something so big, so immeasurable, that bearing your grief requires an act just as complicated and unfathomable as that loss. * My friend Gabriel once told me this story: it happened during a hike in the desert outside of Moab, Utah. As he meditated on the geologic grace of shapes and colors in sandstone formations across the landscape, Gabriel could not help but think how that same beautiful piece of land has changed innumerable times since creation, with wind, water, tectonic shifts all taking a hand in what he considered a work of art. In fact, my friend said he suddenly realized, millennia of changes would still happen, and someday, the place where he now stood would look nothing like it did on this hike. And Gabriel understood that whatever form the land transformed into, it would always be beautiful—just differently beautiful. Because, as the Creator tells us, the world was created in beauty. We often think just the opposite, Gabriel mused; that something beautiful should never change, and if it changes, if it is “scarred” by the upheaval and transformation of its identity, we call it damaged, ugly. No wonder our human response is to always hang onto that “beautiful” state, resist letting it change, take extraordinary steps to preserve it, I said. Thinking, of course, of my own refusals to let change be change. My friend said in that moment, he gained a deep understanding that change is a necessary component to beauty. As he took this understanding into himself, Gabriel continued, he wondered what would happen if—when we humans, ourselves, change (as we are wont to do)—wouldn’t it be comforting to see that as a necessary event also reflected—quite naturally, quite normally—all around us? I responded with my own question: “You mean, if we pay attention to how deeply embedded change is in the matrix of our world, maybe the more personal changes we experience could be less frightening? Maybe [End Page 102] we wouldn’t spend so much of our short lives resisting it?” I knew Gabe was leading me toward a way of thinking very difficult for me. We agreed how empowering it would be to see change as essential, as inevitable, and to learn how to flow with change, to shape ourselves through/with change, rather than feel ourselves as broken, betrayed, or mourning the loss of what no longer exists. But I wondered to myself: can we really learn how to see change as beautiful? Could...
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Mar 13, 2021
Kiymet Kaya + 3
Open Access