Spanish missionaries and soldiers arrive in California, forcing Indigenous people into missions and destroying their cultures through violence.

A priest named Padre Real rapes a young Indigenous girl, Vicenta Gutierrez, inside the church after her confession.

American senator Bradley Sargent cheats Miranda's direct ancestors out of their land at Rancho El Potrero.

Tomas Santos Miranda, the author's great-grandfather, marries Esselen woman Maria Ines Garcia, cementing Miranda's Indigenous ancestry.

Miranda's paternal grandfather Tom records wide-ranging memories of his life on audio cassette tapes for future generations.

Tom Miranda tells a Kansas bartender who asks his nationality that he is a California Mission Indian.

Ethnologist J.P. Harrington, whose notes preserved California Indigenous languages, dies the day before Deborah Miranda is born.

Miranda's earliest memory is watching her father press a knife to her mother's throat.

A married family friend named Buddy rapes seven-year-old Miranda and her six-year-old friend Hannah.

Al Miranda Sr. is released from San Quentin prison and flies to Washington State to reunite with his daughter.

Al Miranda Sr. flies to Los Angeles and takes his four-year-old son Al Jr. away from the boy's mother.

Sixteen-year-old Miranda begins a sexual relationship with her married high-school teacher as an escape from violence at home.

Miranda learns from her half sister Louise that their father brutally raped and beat a waitress in a parking lot.

Miranda and her half sister Louise attend the Breath of Life conference, immersing themselves in surviving Esselen language.

After her father's death, Miranda wades into the water and asks a group of dolphins to carry his spirit.

Spanish missionaries and soldiers arrive in California, forcing Indigenous people into missions through violence and destroying their cultures and languages. Across generations, Miranda's own ancestors endure land theft, rape, and erasure as they struggle to survive under Spanish, Mexican, and then American rule. The author traces her family line through her great-grandfather, grandfather Tom, and finally her father Al Miranda Sr., whose brutality and imprisonment define her childhood. Miranda herself suffers rape as a child, lives under her father's violent rage as a teenager, and escapes into an ill-fated early marriage. After decades of pain and ambivalence, she uncovers the full truth about her father's crimes, finds love with a woman, and reconnects with her Esselen heritage through language. The book ends not with resolution but with an act of grief and release, as Miranda asks the ocean to heal her father's spirit.

The defining events from colonization to forgiveness

A genealogical chart traces domestic violence and alcoholism as direct descendants of the union between Spain and the Catholic Church.

Drawing on Junipero Serra's writings, Miranda depicts Spanish soldiers shooting Indigenous men and roping Indigenous women for rape.

Isabel Meadows, photographed near age 90, is introduced as a vital source who knew the power of Indigenous story.

Miranda imagines joto Victor Acedo recalling how Spanish colonizers turned his own people against him and others like him.

An Indigenous woman named Ularia speaks to the Carmelo River to curse Sargent, who later dies from illness after falling in.

Methodist minister O.P. Fitzgerald describes the Digger Indian as a person who holds a low place in the scale of humanity.

A 1922 newspaper announces US recognition of Miwok as a tribal name, and Indigenous people burn the Digger label in effigy.

Tom Miranda feels terrified during his first airplane ride, arranged by two brothers who take him up briefly.

Tom Miranda hears about the attack on Pearl Harbor and concludes that the US government orchestrated the entire thing.

Miranda features a 1909 Los Angeles Times article declaring that a Bad Indian went on a rampage at Santa Ynez.

Fifteen-year-old Miranda stands in her trailer holding a handgun, contemplating shooting her father and then herself.

Miranda marries her former high-school teacher at age 19, partly to escape her violent home situation.

Miranda's white maternal grandfather refuses to let the dark-skinned girl stay in his house because she resembles her father.

Miranda and a group visit the Soledad Mission and find bone fragments unearthed by bulldozers from an Indigenous graveyard.

Miranda discovers that her ancestors' stolen ranch El Potrero still exists as part of a real-estate preserve for the very wealthy.

From the earliest days of the missions through Miranda's own lifetime, a second layer of events reveals how Indigenous people resisted, were degraded, and stubbornly persisted. Colonial violence is catalogued in poetry and newspapers, while individual Indigenous figures — from jotos cast out by their own communities to elders photographed on mission ruins — testify to survival at enormous cost. Miranda's grandfather Tom moves through the 20th century with wandering curiosity, taking his first plane ride and distrusting a government he sees as fundamentally hostile. Miranda's own childhood and adolescence are marked by isolation, her grandfather's absence, and a moment of near-lethal despair. As an adult, she slowly begins piecing together her identity, confronting both the physical remnants of the missions and the stolen land her ancestors once called home. Each of these moments adds texture to the main story, showing the countless ways that the legacy of colonization pressed down on ordinary lives.

Moments of resistance, identity, and inherited survival across generations

Miranda annotates her daughter's mission coloring book, exposing how passive voice hides the fact that enslaved Indians built the mission.

Miranda composes an imagined letter to Vicenta Gutierrez, and in doing so reveals she herself was raped as a child.

Miranda watches her father beat four-year-old Al Jr. with a belt, while interspersed historical texts praise Indigenous parents' natural gentleness.

An Indigenous healer named Jacinta Gonzalez nurses novelist Robert Louis Stevenson back to health using traditional plant medicine.

Miranda studies a single surviving photograph of her great-grandfather Tomas Santos, seeing a pain-hardened man who refused to be broken.

Tom Miranda recalls witnessing a man decapitated at a lumber camp and immediately quitting the job.

Miranda composes a Novena to Bad Indians, directing traditional Catholic prayers toward Indigenous ancestors who resisted genocide.

J.P. Harrington's field notes record Petie Simpson, a young man raised among whites, expressing fierce distrust of the US government.

A doctor named Ousdal writes to Harrington suggesting that the bones of dying Indigenous man Juan Justo should become Smithsonian property.

Miranda's mother befriends Buddy, a married man who initially treats Miranda and her friend Hannah with warmth and kindness.

Miranda writes a poem about being raped at age seven and shares it with two female friends, who respond with empathy.

Miranda finds love with a woman for the first time, sharing a kiss at Shoshone Falls with their feet in the water.

Miranda keeps a daily journal during a Spanish immersion course, wondering when her ancestors first abandoned Esselen words for Spanish ones.

Al Miranda Sr. tells his young daughter he was imprisoned because the woman lied about her age and about consent.

After Al Miranda Sr. dies in a hospice, his son Al Jr. carries the father's ashes to California for a funeral ceremony.

Throughout the book, specific moments of revelation and decision fundamentally change how Miranda — and the reader — understands the cost of colonization. In the early historical sections, Miranda's own creative interventions expose the violence hidden inside official language, while her imagined letter to a raped Indigenous girl forces her to acknowledge her own childhood assault. As the narrative moves through the lives of her grandfather Tom and other mission descendants, quiet moments — a man decapitated at a lumber camp, an ethnologist's cold letter about Indigenous bones — reveal how deeply the government's hostility shaped Indigenous lives. In Part 4, a series of personal turning points accumulates: Miranda is forced to confront the version of events her father told her, then later the truth, and alongside these reckonings she discovers her own capacity for love and transformation. Her half sister Louise, who compiled the first Esselen-English dictionary, is both a catalyst for these revelations and a symbol of what can be rebuilt from fragments. Together, these events chart the emotional spine of Miranda's journey from inherited trauma toward an imperfect but chosen identity.

Key discoveries and emotional shifts that reframe Miranda's understanding of herself and her people