Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

very well known in the San Luis Rey area, came up
as a difficult topic in her interview with Luiseño
elder and keeper of culture Louise Munoa Foussat,
who died in 2005. Foussat had always been offended
by the newspaper’s use of the word “beggars” to
describe the three women, she told Hawthorne,
asserting instead that in exchange for spare change,
the women would tell stories to visitors and pose for
pictures—not begging at all, but a straightforward,
above-board business transaction. In fact, if anyone
came up short in that exchange, it was Tomasa,
Rosaria, and Vaselia. When writing her book, Ms.
Hawthorne stated, she wanted to honor Foussat’s
perceptive retelling of an inaccurate history, so she
substituted “tour guides” for “beggars” when writing
about the photograph.
I wrote back, thanking her for making that choice,
even though her euphemism was not entirely true
either; the complications of missionization are not so
easily unknotted, and such rhetorical changes cannot
entirely discredit destructive mythologies. But the
beginning of awareness is good to see.
This image of these three women about whom we
have such limited information—their first names
(baptismal, not Indigenous), a fragment of their
story—intrigues me, breaks my heart, haunts me. I