Intervening with the Mission Mythology
According to Lisa Udel, “Miranda works to counter pre-vailing narratives about Native people still evident in contemporary American culture—such as the California school curriculum’s fourth-grade ‘mission project’”[6] Miranda demonstrates how “the Mission Unit” promotes imperialist and racist ideologies, rather than portray an accurate history of California Missions.[7] Miranda combats these overarching mythologies by “writing a tribalography that challenges the official story.”[8] According to Choctaw author LeAnne Howe, who developed the term, tribalography refers to a rhetorical style that Native people use as an “eloquent act of unification.”[9]
In one passage, Miranda recounts her visit to Mission Doloras. During her visit, she meets a mother and her daughter, who are there for the daughter’s Mission Project. In response to a remark about California Natives existence, Miranda reveals that she is a member of the Ohlone/Costanoa Esselen Nation.[7] Miranda focuses on the daughter, recounting that, “Her face drained, her body went stiff, and she stared at me as if I had risen, an Indigenous skeleton clad in decrepit rags, from beneath the clay bricks of the courtyard.”[7] Regarding this story, Shanae A. Martinez notes that, “Miranda's living presence intervenes in the Mission Mythology, which denies the existence of any living Mission Indians and in effect denies their claims to land...she [] epitomizes the process by which settler-colonial metanarratives are institutionally authorized and internalized.”[8]
The power of storytelling
As several critics note, the memoir demonstrates the power of stories and storytelling as vehicles for Indigenous people’s histories and resistance.[4][5][7] In an interview about the memoir Miranda states, “Story is the great healer—of people, of histories, of imbalance.”[4] Lauren Furlan explains how storytelling as a form of historical retelling when she states that “Miranda makes her ancestor’s storytelling a valid mode of Indigenous history-keeping and history-telling, demonstrating that stories of Indigenous life are history in the same way that official records are history.”[10]
One specific story involves a young Indigenous woman named Vicenta Gutierrez, who was sexually assaulted by Padre Real. In her retelling, Isabel narrates the story tersely, stating that “‘the girl went running to her house, saying the Padre had grabbed her.’”[5] According to Shanae A. Martinez, this story counters the mythology of missions being absent of abuse and sexual assault and tells a story about resistance.[8] As Lisa J. Udel states, “Miranda reads Meadows’s use of Vicenta’s story as a form of community activism against ‘silence and lies.’”[6] It works and reworks the functions and expectations of storytelling, for as Furlan elaborates, “we are engaged in a very Indigenous practice: that of storytelling as education, as thought-experiment, as community action to right a wrong, as resistance to representation as victim.”[10]
