When Hands Speak Trauma

Image Description: A bloody handprint is overlaid with a line drawing of a child’s hand grasping an adult’s. In bottom left corner, a woman weeps; in the top right, a woman is surrounded by flowers and butterflies. At the bottom right corner is an excerpt from the book that reads: “Frightened hands. Frightening hands.” 

In her mixed-genre autobiography “Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir,” writer, poet, and scholar Deborah Miranda seeks to understand both her personal and inherited traumas, as well as the broader history of her Indigenous community. As I read, I was struck by how seamlessly she connects intimate family experiences with the collective history of California Indians to reveal how personal pain reflects the enduring legacy of colonial violence on Indigenous communities. She does this by deepening her understanding of her father, Al, who is her closest familial link to her Indigeneity, but also someone who has deeply wounded her. This prompts her to examine Al’s relationship with her grandfather Tom, as well as Tom’s relationship with her great-grandfather Tomás, which leads her to identify the brutal history of forced Missionization and displacement that prompted the cycles of violence within California Indian families and communities. She connects her personal experience with domestic violence to broader familial and communal experiences with violence, abuse and genocide. By doing so, she recognizes that the historical context of forced Missionization and displacement, though in the past, is deeply intertwined with the present forms of violence she and other California Indians both experience and perpetuate. This comprehensive perspective enriches her understanding of her Indigenous heritage, while also enabling her to view her father with more sympathy rather than pure hatred. 

Deborah Miranda paints a vivid picture of her father Al’s violence, describing how he whipped her younger half-brother for crying when he lost a tooth while wrestling with him. She writes, “…my father has seized my little brother by his plump arm, swung him around across the lap that should be comfort, should be home, should be refuge, and is swinging the doubled belt with such force that the air protests…” (p 48). Here, she juxtaposes forceful, violent words with gentle, comforting words. She describes how roughly her father handled his son by using words like “seized” and “swung,” highlighting the violence of the scene. Furthermore, by personifying “air,” giving it the ability to “protest” at the force with which her father swung the belt, I felt that she draws attention to the unnatural nature of a father whipping his son, as even the air — typically an invisible, neutral and passive element — protests. She contrasts violent actions with gentle terminology describing what her father’s lap, across which he violently swung his son, “should be,” writing how it “should be comfort, should be home, should be refuge.” Her use of anaphora highlights what “should be,” but is not, emphasizing how a father’s lap “should be” a safe, protective place, rather than a site of pain and abuse. By juxtaposing violent terminology with vocabulary indicating the gentle nature of what “should be,” Deborah Miranda amplifies the dissonance between the reality of her father’s violence and the nurturing role he “should be” playing. 

Though Deborah Miranda’s father did not directly whip her, the inextricably close bond she shared with her half-brother Little Al suggests that, as a helpless witness to his abuse, she was just as affected by the pain he suffered, especially because of her inability to intervene. She uses metaphorical language to describe how she and Little Al “were two lost halves that had found each other at last. We were one person” (p 187). Through this repeated metaphor of their fractured selves coming together to become whole, presented in slightly varied wording to reinforce and emphasize the siblings’ tight bond, Deborah Miranda deepens readers’ understanding of their close relationship. I found that her use of the oppositional words “lost” and “found” further demonstrates how important the siblings were to each other. The word “lost” conveys a sense of absence and disorientation, highlighting how vulnerable and incomplete the siblings were before finding each other. In contrast, the word “found” invokes feelings of security and fulfillment, demonstrating how Deborah Miranda and her brother only managed to find a sense of home and belonging once they connected. Unfortunately, Al Miranda manipulated his daughter Deborah’s love for her brother. Deborah Miranda writes, “When my father discovered that he could beat [Little] Al in order to punish me, he discovered the perfect way to control me.” This sentence follows a parallel structure, with the repeated phrase “discovered” followed by “to punish/control me.” This sentence structure emphasizes the cause-and-effect relationship of her father’s beating of Little Al as a means to punish and control her. Deborah Miranda’s use of the word “discovered” implies an active seeking of information, and carries connotations of delight and excitement. By using “discovered” instead of terms with more passive or neutral associations such as “realized” or “caught onto,” she suggests that her father actively sought out ways to control his children, and found a sort of twisted delight upon his discovery that by beating his son, he could control her. This contributes to an image of him as a cold, emotionless father who methodically calculated ways to manipulate his children’s love for each other. By providing details about her relationship with Little Al, and explaining how her father took advantage of their close bond, Deborah Miranda shows her readers the unique way she indirectly experienced domestic abuse, highlighting its profound impact on her. 

Deborah Miranda’s memories of her father were not all associated with violence. Instead, in the section “Testimony,” she introduces her father’s tender, loving, “domestic” side, which offers deeper insight into their complex relationship dynamic. She describes the precious moments spent gardening, shopping, cooking and exchanging stories with her father, showing a caring, nurturing side of him that was loudly absent from her descriptions of his violent treatment toward Little Al. She describes her realization that despite the hardships, discrimination and violence her father endured that seemed to harden him, “[he] was as starved for love as [herself]” (p 182). For me, the metaphor “starved for love” evoked images of someone or something in a pitiable, weak and helpless state, like a “love-starved puppy” or an orphan “starved for love.” By employing this metaphor, Deborah Miranda portrays her father as frail and helpless, generating sympathy and understanding that suggests that he was also a victim of emotional neglect, and as a result, was only capable of reciprocating the violence he received. By connecting his fondness for sharing stories with his family to his ravenous yearning for love, she reveals his vulnerable, child-like side, alluding to unhealed wounds that caused him to inflict violence upon his children.

Recognizing a connection between her father’s experiences with emotional neglect and his violent parenting style, Deborah Miranda seeks to understand his wounds by exploring his relationship with his own father, Tom. In the section “Tuolumne,” she describes an occasion when Tom took Al to the Tuolumne River and shared a story of Indians’ historical and current connection to this river, even after violent displacement. In this tender moment between father and son, Deborah Miranda writes, “He wouldn’t have touched my father on the shoulder, wouldn’t have patted him on the back. The only touch shared between these two men had been blows” (p 204). By repeating the phrase “wouldn’t have,” she emphasizes the absence of affection between the two men, even in this delicate moment where he talks about his Indian heritage, something he “never shared [w]ith his boys.” This ultimately illuminates a vast emotional void in their relationship (p 203). Deborah Miranda also employs irony, describing how “the only touch” the two men “shared” “had been blows.” The words “touch” and “shared” imply a mutual, positive physical human connection, while the word “blows” evokes images of physical violence. By revealing that the only form of physical connection her father received from her grandfather was violence, she identifies a generational pattern, where the men in her family communicate through physical aggression. This helps foster a sympathetic attitude toward her father’s background, suggesting that he has only experienced and learned to communicate through violence. 

To understand the broader cycle of violence within her family, Deborah Miranda learns about her great-grandfather Tomás. She discovers that, like her father, Tomás possessed a delicate side, illustrated by how he built rabbit pens and shared excitement with his son upon seeing baby rabbits. However, she also recognizes the life experiences that ultimately hardened him, much like her father. Born in 1877, 107 years after Spanish missionaries seized Indigenous land and began a brutal campaign of forced conversion, labor, and cultural erasure, Tomás Miranda faced immense challenges as an Indigenous person. By then, the California Indian population had been reduced by ninety-eight percent due to genocide. Living in a world that robbed his people and forced them to fight for tribal recognition, Tomás was compelled to resort to violence as a protective survival mechanism. Deborah Miranda writes, “These hands have had too many things slip out of their grasp, These hands can’t be gentle; gentle means dead” (p 88). The emotional weight of this statement intensifies as she adds, “Frightened hands. Frightening hands.” These lines poignantly capture how the brutality and dispossession wrought by Missionization stripped gentleness of safety, turning it into a threat to survival. Deborah Miranda’s vivid descriptions of her great-grandfather’s hands evoke a very physical, tactile image, which made me visualize and feel the pain and loss they had experienced. This imagery generates sympathy for Tomás Miranda, emphasizing how the violence he inflicted with his hands was the only way he knew how to protect himself and his loved ones, even if that meant hurting the very people he tried to protect. 

In “Bad Indians,” Deborah Miranda seeks a deeper understanding of generational domestic violence in California Indian families and communities, informed by her indirect experiences with domestic violence through her father’s abuse of her brother. As she traces these patterns of harm, she reveals how healing and understanding become possible when personal experiences are understood alongside collective histories of pain and survival — a realization that also resonated deeply with me as a reader. Deborah Miranda works through her personal and familial experiences with violence, cultivating a more sympathetic attitude toward the male perpetrators in her family by identifying the legacy of generational trauma from the Missionization and forced displacement of California Indians. This collective history manifested as violence within not just her family, but the broader Indigenous community. In this way, she turns a site of pain into a site of solidarity by showing how intimate family secrets, such as domestic violence, are rooted in broader systemic issues like Missionization, encouraging fellow survivors to embrace collective healing rather than keep their pain hidden away in shame.