Seattle Latinx Bookclub - Bad Indians

This month we'll be discussing Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. A beautiful and devastating book--part tribal history, part lyric and intimate memoir. As always, our number one priority is creating comunidad. So please feel free to attend even if you didn't get a chance to finish the book this month.

Nos vemos pronto!

Where to find the book

You can find a copy of their book on Bookshop.org here

Purchase through Estelita's Library's Bookshop.org storefront, and you'll support Seattle's local Black/Brown-owned justice-focused community bookstore & lending library.

You can also find the book at Seattle Public Library in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.

About the Book

"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."

About the Authors

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. Her mixed-genre memoir Bad Indians received the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award, won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award. She is the author of four poetry collections: Altar for Broken Things, Raised by Humans, The Zen of La Llorona, and Indian Cartography, and coeditor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. She earned her PhD in English literature from the University of Washington in Seattle and was Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing. She retired from her professorship in 2021 to focus on scholarship and poetry involved California Mission history and literatures. She and her spouse, writer Margo Solod, live in Eugene, Oregon, a short distance from homelands in California.

2025 Meeting Dates & Book Picks

• , Iris Morales
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• , Camila Sosa Villada
• , Cristina Enriquez
• , Yesika Salgado
• , Vincent Tirado
• , Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• , Cristina Rivera Garza
• , Aja Monet
• , Isabel Cañas
• , Deborah Miranda

Host or Publisher Seattle Latinx Bookclub