“Who am I, if my community can no longer function as a community?”
In the memoir, Miranda does not simply chart her life but the lives of her people, the Native Californians, all the way back to the Mission period. As part of the surviving generation trying to regain their heritage and their past history back, Miranda uses various accounts in the memoir. She stresses of the Mission system that aimed to erase the heritage of Native Californians detaching them from their identity. Therefore, to understand herself and know her identity she has to understand her past and culture. The assertion highlights her resolve to reclaim their history and redraft the history that had been thinned and taught to the subsequent generations.
“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 design together, complement the shards around us, bring wholeness to the world and ourselves”
Rather than offer the memoir in a traditional way of telling the narrative through her personal story Miranda brings a more diverse account. Miranda traces her family history when her people were subjugated to the Mission system and dispersed. Through official documents and records, she offers an authentic account to dispel the myths and diluted history around Native Californians. She delves into the idea of heritage and identity by interconnecting her story with the experiences of those who came before her. She acknowledges that personal identity is beyond the self as we are an embodiment of where we come from and who our ancestors were.
“Sometimes something is so badly broken you cannot recreate its original shape at all. If you try, you create a deformed, imperfect image of what you’ve lost; you will always compare what your creation looks like with what it used to look like.”
The memoir is a crusade for the continuance of Native heritage amidst the damage done by erasure and assimilation through history. Thus, reclaiming a broken past that has undergone centuries of dilution is not an easy task and the end result will be an imperfect image of what was. On a personal level, Miranda has come to terms with her dysfunctional childhood and the traumas she suffered. Through forgiveness, she is willing to get past the hurt and pain caused by her parents’ shortcomings. But as the statement asserts on both a personal and community scope the act of reclaiming cannot undo the damage but create something new.
