Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

My mother’s parents, white farm kids from
Nebraska who had moved to Los Angeles in the early
1930s and found their own private paradise, were
horrified, enraged, and devastated. Although for all
the wrong reasons, given the outcome of their
daughter’s marriage, that turned out to be an
appropriate response. I’m pretty sure they had never
even seen a black man in the flesh before arriving in
L.A. as married adults; I don’t think they’d seen what
they thought of as an “Indian” until they took a trip
through the Southwest when my mother was a child.
As far as they knew, people of color—especially men
of color—were practically another species, people
you hired or saw doing manual labor, like their
Japanese gardener (sent to an internment camp
during World War II and never seen again). A
colored man was not fit to marry their daughter,
even if she was a divorcée with two young children, a
tattered reputation, a shattered heart.
By 1961, my father’s family had been enduring
and/or celebrating mixed-race unions for about two
hundred years in one form or another: California
Indian with Mexican Indian, Chumash with Esselen,
Spaniard with Indian, and rich variations thereof. By
force, by choice, or by love, mixed-race unions were
a tradition for those who survived the California
missions. Those who will not change do not survive;