“In other words, the Mission Unit is all too often a lesson in imperialism, racism, and Manifest Destiny rather than actually educational or a jumping off point for critical thinking or accurate history.”

The “Mission Unit” refers to part of California’s educational curriculum that requires fourth-graders to complete a mission-related project. This often involves nine- and 10-year-olds working on mission-themed coloring books or putting together easy-to-assemble replica missions purchased from one of California’s mission gift shops. Miranda denounces the “Mission Unit” as the equivalent of asking elementary-school students to complete slavery- or Holocaust-related projects in which those ugly histories are equally sanitized.

“The bottom line is that individual missions were successful only for the missionaries, who spent their lives secure in the belief that they served their Supreme Deity faithfully and had done no wrong.”

This line appears in the “Mission” entry of “My Mission Glossary,” a section Miranda calls “excerpts from a very late fourth grade project” (6). In both the “Mission” entry and the glossary section as a whole, Miranda often uses dark and subversive sarcasm, such as describing the mission as a “Massive Conversion Factory” that relied on a “fresh supply of human beings” for the “production of converts” (16). Miranda mixes these sarcastic comments, however, with serious assessments like this quotation. Furthermore, all such references to missionaries are reminders that much of the surviving mission-related evidence, which Miranda uses throughout her book, comes from missionary sources.

“But it all went to Spain, to Rome, to Mexico, into the pockets of merchants, smugglers, priests, dishonest administrators, and finally to the cruel Americans.”

Also, from Miranda’s “My Mission Glossary,” this line appears under the “Padre” entry. “It” refers to the product of Indigenous people’s labors, from which they reaped no reward. “It” also refers to land stolen from Indigenous people, first by the Spaniards and then, after 1848, by the Americans.

“Scholars write dissertations, sexual violence against colonized women is a real field of study, and what happened in the dark confessional or between the pews is suddenly outrageous, a weapon of colonization, not a shameful wound.”

Miranda composes an imagined letter to Vicenta Gutierrez, a young Indigenous girl from the Carmel Mission who reported that she was raped by a priest. Although the attack occurred in the early 19th century, Isabel Meadows remembered the story and told it to J. P. Harrington in 1935. Here, Miranda attempts to recover Vicenta’s actual traumatic experience from beneath layers of academic terminology. She also introduces sexual violence as one of the book’s major themes.

“More than anything else we brought with us out of the missions, we carry the violence we were given along with baptism, confession, last rites.”

From “Genealogy of Violence, Part II,” this line represents the first of Miranda’s attempts to make sense of her own father’s often-frightening outbursts of rage. In this section, Miranda describes her father beating his young son with a belt. She intersperses five excerpts, presumably historical (attributing each excerpt to one of four different missions, which likely means that the excerpts can be found in the writings of Spanish priests or soldiers), all of which note Indigenous parents’ excessive tenderness toward their children. Miranda’s assertion is clear: The violence that Indigenous people in California experienced in the missions stayed with them for generations, or in the case of her father, for centuries.

“If this woman was in or near the goldfields in ‘49, she was in the middle of one of the bloodiest genocides ever documented, one approved and funded by the United States government.”

“This woman” refers to a young Indigenous woman who appears in a sketch of a photograph entitled “A Digger Belle.” The young woman is topless with full breasts and spiked hair. Miranda speculates that these could be signs of mourning due to the recent loss of a baby. Although the date of the photograph is unknown, Miranda notes that the sketch appears in a book written by an Indiana man who traveled to California during the 1849 Gold Rush. This allows Miranda to suggest that the woman in the photograph might have lived in the gold regions at a time when the US government paid bounties for Indigenous scalps.

“In 1877, it had been 107 years since Junipero Serra founded San Carlos Borromeo del rio Carmelo. From a pre-missionization population estimated as high as one million, California Indians now numbered about twenty thousand.”

Miranda’s paternal great-grandfather, Tomas Santos Miranda, was born in the year 1877. This quotation appears near the end of a section entitled “Bridges,” wherein the author explains her ancestors’ connections to the Carmel Mission in the mid to late 19th century. She regards Tomas Santos and his era as “the bridge between missionization and post-secularization” (73). By the early 20th century, when Tomas Santos was a young man, the holocaust of California’s Indigenous depopulation was largely complete—so much so that the US government still doesn’t formally recognize the Esselen tribe to which Miranda’s ancestors belonged.

“Recent work by Eduardo and Bonnie Duran (Native American Postcolonial Psychology) suggests that the survivors of genocide manifest symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder many generations past the original violence.”

Here, Miranda lends academic authority to her assertion that mission-related violence can affect even the survivors’ descendants, in this case centuries later. This legacy of violence constitutes one of Miranda’s major themes. As she explains, this has deep personal relevance: “This seems so useful in understanding the dynamics and dysfunctions of my own family” (77)!

“You could see it that far, about three hundred miles.”

These are the words of Miranda’s paternal grandfather, Tom Miranda, as recorded and preserved on audio cassette. In this subsection, Tom Miranda describes his youthful fascination with a distant light, visible on every clear night from a great distance. The light turned out to be an airplane beacon atop Mt. Diablo, a sacred location for Indigenous people in California in that region. The author interprets this “light from the Carrisa Plains” as captivating to young Tom Miranda because it meant that the mountain was calling him home.

“I said, ‘No, I’m a California Mission Indian.’”

These are also the words of Tom Miranda, the author’s grandfather, who relates a curious incident, somewhere in Kansas, in which he awakened next to a beautiful woman, fully clothed, whom he didn’t recognize, and then went to a bar early in the morning to get a whiskey because he didn’t feel well. The friendly Slavic bartender asked Tom’s nationality, to which Tom replied that he was a “California Mission Indian.” Although Tom shared it as part of a humorous anecdote, this exchange is an important piece of evidence, for it shows that even in the early to mid-20th century the author’s direct ancestors identified themselves with the missions.

“I am hoping that when he wanders with the spirit of his fathers and has no use for his old bones, that they may become the property of the Smithsonian Institution.”

The author of this sentence is a Doctor of Osteopathy named A. P. Ousdal, a correspondent of English ethnologist J. P. Harrington. Ousdal’s letters to Harrington date from the first half of the 20th century. “He” who will have “no use for his old bones” is a California Indigenous man named Juan Justo, whose gangrenous leg Ousdal was both treating and studying. Miranda doesn’t comment on this excerpt or others from Ousdal’s letters. Instead, she allows Ousdal’s callous description of Justo as an anthropological research subject—as “property of the Smithsonian Institution”—to stand for itself.

“I can’t tell because at seven years old I don’t have words to describe the pain thrusting into my vagina—a hand around my throat—sound of a man’s ragged breath next to my ear.”

In this disturbing passage, Miranda describes her rape at the hands of her mother’s friend, a married man from Washington State named Buddy. Miranda’s six-year-old friend Hannah endured the same fate. Violence, including sexual violence against women and children, constitutes one of the book’s major themes.

“I knew how to beat back Disappear.”

Miranda explains how she felt when she first learned the significance of the written word. As a young girl, she found that eventually everyone in her life would disappear, including her parents. This entire section is about disappearing, which is why she capitalizes the word “Disappear.” Young Miranda assumed that she, too, would disappear, but eventually came to believe that by making her mark, in this case by writing “DEBY” in red crayon, she could survive.

“My own identity as ‘Indian’ stares right into the mouth of extinction.”

Miranda reflects on the difficulty of reconstructing her tribe’s identity from the shards of so few surviving pieces. She asks, “Who am I, if I’m not part of a recognized tribe?” (136). She laments divisions that exist even inside her small tribal community. Most of all, like her paternal grandfather, she establishes “Indian” as her identity.

“Every time I learn a Spanish word I want to know the Esselen word it replaced.”

In graduate school, Miranda keeps a daily journal of her Spanish-immersion course, which she took to satisfy her program’s foreign-language requirement. She can’t learn Spanish, however, without thinking about her own ancestors’ vanished language.

“Our Lady of Sorrows weeps in her niche behind the altar, dressed in black, inconsolable. What has been done in her name? She doesn’t want to know.”

On a visit to the remains of the Soledad Mission, built on the site of an ancient Esselen village, Miranda enters the chapel, where she imagines the reaction of “Our Lady of Sorrows,” most likely a statue of the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, to the atrocities “done in her name.” The present cause of the Lady’s imagined weeping is the bulldozing of a nearby Indigenous graveyard, which unearthed numerous bone fragments. Here, Miranda shows that the missionaries who brutalized Indigenous people in California acted in a manner contrary to the lives and teachings of those whom the missionaries claimed to worship.

“Now I think what I sensed was my father’s unspeakable joy at belonging again to a place, to land, to creation.”

In her “Testimony,” Miranda explains how she came to love, fear, hate, and ultimately forgive her troubled father. This passage describes her feelings during a six-month period immediately following her parents’ reunion with one another over Christmas 1974, when she sensed a lightness and happiness about her father that young Miranda herself also felt for a brief time. Significantly, she sensed this happiness in the context of her father’s love of gardening, which she attributes in part to his Indigenous heritage. Much like her grandfather Tom, who was drawn to the light from atop sacred Mt. Diablo, her father seemed to have a natural connection to the land.

“The hour itself seems to encourage renewal and rededication. This is one custom that we survivors can reclaim, keep alive by the thin braided threads of chance, stubbornness, dignity.”

The “hour” refers to the “space just before and after dawn” (158). Miranda likes to awaken early, take advantage of the quiet time so conducive to productivity, and express gratitude for another day. Her father also rose early and worked best in the morning. She describes this habit as a tribal legacy from pre-colonization days. She also sees it as both a metaphor and mechanism for continuing survival.

“It is our father whose body is the source of the most precious part of our identity, and the most damning legacies of our history.”

As she continues to wrestle with ambivalent feelings toward her father, Miranda acknowledges that he’s “the” source—her only source—of Indigenous identity. Miranda chooses to regard her Indigenous heritage as “the most precious part” of her identity, which explains why she devotes so much space to a “Testimony” about her father. At this point in the narrative, Miranda has just learned from her half sister, Louise, that their father spent eight years in prison, not for a consensual encounter with a girl who lied about being 18, which is what he told Miranda years earlier, but for the brutal rape of a waitress who refused his advances.

“That was the first time I really understood, in my bones, the unimaginable, savage splintering that my ancestors—and my father, my sisters, my brother, my self—had endured.”

Having learned that her father was convicted and imprisoned for a brutal rape, Miranda finally puts the pieces together in her mind. She recalls from adolescence that surviving her own father meant adopting some of his brutal tactics, which leads to her conclusion: “This is how our ancestors survived the missions” (172). For Miranda, the legacy of violence, one of the book’s major themes, sheds new light on her troubled family and personal experiences with brutality.

“I love my father. I hate my father.”

This is the clearest and most succinct statement of Miranda’s ambivalent feelings toward her father. As a teen, Miranda once held a gun and thought about killing her sleeping father, a rage-filled man with alcoholism who, she learned years later, had gone to prison for brutally raping a woman. On the other hand, Miranda’s “Testimony” section features four photos of her father. These photos depict Al Miranda, Sr. smiling, gardening with his son, cooking and “goofing off” (156) in the family kitchen, and holding his daughter on his knee at the beach, respectively. The California “Mission Indians’” legacy of violence offers Miranda a way to reconcile these two distinct sides of her father’s nature.

“I have learned two important and seemingly oppositional facts about that light.”

The “light” is the “Light from the Carrisa Plains” that Miranda’s grandfather Tom described. Here, Miranda explains that the light her grandfather saw came from Mt. Diablo, a sacred place for Indigenous people in that region. She notes, however, that the light originated from an airplane beacon, a sacrilegious mark of an alien civilization atop that revered mountain. She reconciles these “two oppositional facts,” however, by recalling that the “Light from the Carrisa Plains” that called to her grandfather also called to her. In so doing, it compelled her “to look at both the blessing and the genocide” (196).

“The loss of land is a kind of soul wound that the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation still feels; a wound which we negotiate every day of our lives.”

Miranda describes how a wealthy American named Bradley Sargent, who served as one of California’s first state senators, stole a ranch called El Potrero from her direct ancestors. Although this particular theft affected her family, Miranda attributes a shared feeling of loss to all surviving members of the tribe.