Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

children: my grandfather Thomas Anthony Miranda
and his sister Carmen. The Mirandas were noted as
“Indians without land.”
The Kelsey census is a long story. Suffice it to say
that without it, my family would not have been
officially Indian, but with all its incomplete, inept,
careless record-keeping, the Kelsey census
obliterated the Esselen people. Its inaccurate “count”
of Esselen people encouraged Alfred Kroeber’s 1925
pronouncement that Esselen people and culture
were extinct, thus making it easier for Sacramento
Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent Lafayette A.
Dorrington to drop us off the list of landless tribes
who would benefit from a reservation. (Actually,
Dorrington dropped 135 other tribes, and completely
left Esselen off either list—but we were promptly
designated “terminated” anyway when that little
loophole was uncovered.) We have been fighting for
recognition as a California tribe for many years; even
though Kroeber corrected his own mistake in 1955,
arguing and demonstrating to the BIA and the
Justice Department the existence of Esselen tribal
families, you will still find “Esselen” cheerfully
recorded as the first tribe in California to be declared
extinct, and the US government still does not
recognize our existence as tribal people.