Bad Indians: An Auto-Ethnographic Memoir of Survival
Articles > Critical Article · 2025
Authors: Esra Ayşe ÖZTARHAN
Metin ve Analiz, Refereed Journals of Other Institutions, International, TR DİZİN (ULAKBİM), 2025, pp 121-134
Summary
<p>Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir portrays the story of her life and the history of Californian Indians who had survived the literal and cultural genocide. It can be regarded as an auto-ethnographic text as she engaged in the narration as a witness and a researcher of her community. The paper aims to analyze her memoir using terminology created by Native American writer and critic Gerald Vizenor. He explains Native American literature with terms like survivance, postindian, and storying. Firstly, Miranda uses the memoir genre to construct a story about her people and family. In Vizenor’s terms, the storying is her tool for deconstructing the stories told by mainstream culture for centuries. Secondly, she is a postindian, someone who defies the established norms expected from Native Americans. She wants to correct the racist stereotypes about Native Americans as primitive, lazy, godless, and ugly people. Moreover, she resists the notion that their people were considered an extinct race. Lastly, the text unites her own experiences with the survival story of her tribe. This is the core of Vizenor’s concept of survivance, a word that combines the words survival and defiance as a continuation of existence and perseverance.</p><h3>Anahtar Kelimeler</h3><p><a href="https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/search?q=%22Autoethnography%22" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Autoethnography</a>, <a href="https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/search?q=%22Indian+American+literature%22" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Indian American literature</a>, <a href="https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/search?q=%22memoir%22" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">memoir</a>, <a href="https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/search?q=%22hybrid+text%22" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hybrid text</a>, <a href="https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/search?q=%22Gerald+Vizenor%22" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gerald Vizenor</a></p>