Reflections on Bad Indians and Archives

This essay explores Deborah Miranda's use of archival sources for her book Bad Indians. In it, I address three points: the varied sources Miranda uses, how Miranda uses what Saidiya Hartman call critical fabulation to work with these materials, and how her work shows us that we should always use an "always assumed" approach to absences in the archive, we should always assume the presence of indigenous people even when the colonial archive omits these presences.