This is the keynote delivered by Deborah Miranda at the CISSA symposium. Beginning with a set of questions she has received since writing Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Miranda reflects on the life of the book as well as the material circumstances of its writing through the image of a tsunami. Thinking about the damage, the survivors and debris, and the lasting effects of histories of catastrophe and violence, Miranda asserts that Bad Indians is a reflection on how to ride the tsunami. It is a book of transformation, of trying to catch the wave of change in all its difficulty.  

This is an excerpted section from Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. It retells a story told by Isabel Meadows about an Esselen woman who, in complicity with a river, cursed the white man who stole her people's land and removed them.