Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

hearts, savaged and misused. I’ve come to the
conclusion, horrifying and bitter as the words sound,
that there are too few original pieces of our tribe left
to glue back together.
The gaps in such a construction are violent and
sickening; like a Frankenstein brought back from the
dead, such an artificial construct too often fails us in
its ability to love and be loved, to love itself. I’m
afraid that our people aren’t capable of mending in
the ways we keep thinking we must. If I think about
this too much, it breaks my heart. My own identity
as “Indian” stares right into the mouth of extinction.
Who am I, if I’m not part of a recognized tribe? Who
am I, if my tribal council splits open, if relatives
accuse one another of cheating, lying, or grabbing
what little power there is? Who am I, if my
community can no longer function as a community?
But I’m not admitting failure. We must rethink our
strategy, our goals. Maybe, like a basket that has
huge holes where pieces were ripped out and is
crumbling to dust and can’t be reclaimed, my tribe
must reinvent ourselves—rather than try to copy
what isn’t there in the first place. We must think of
ourselves as a mosaic, human beings constructed of
multiple sources of beauty, pieces that alone are
merely incomplete but which, when set into a new