The Bookshelf

Understanding the histories that shape our lives isn’t easy when so much of what we learn in school and history books conceals, misrepresents or downright fabricates the truth. But gaining that understanding provides the key to being in the right relationships with the land, each other and ourselves—an idea that’s central to Deborah Jackson Taffa’s new memoir, Whiskey Tender (HarperCollins, Feb. 27).

Taffa (Quechan and Laguna Pueblo) is the director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and a recent recipient of a $25,000 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first foray into memoir, Whiskey Tender, excavates the legal, political and historical forces that intimately shaped her family’s life, following Taffa from the California Quechan (Yuma) reservation, to Farmington in Navajo territory, to Yellowstone National Park for her first job after leaving home.

Taffa writes: “A father’s job was to control the pace of the world’s wounding, to dole out the pain in slightly bigger doses over time so that his kids would learn not to break under pressure.”

That’s the role Taffa takes as narrator of her own story, meting out the beauty, heartbreak, humor and anger to her readers as tenderly as a loving parent.

She always knew she wanted to tell the story of her own childhood as a mixed-tribe Native girl in the context of broader Indigenous histories, she tells SFR. This story bridges a gap in the American literary canon.

“I’ve never seen a comprehensive coming-of-age memoir written by a Native person,” Taffa says. “They say you should write the book that you need, and for me, that’s the story of a Native kid growing up and leaving home.”

She reckoned with Quechan (Yuma) tribal traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories in writing Whiskey Tender, and acknowledges how the pressure for Indigenous cultures to assimilate in a violent, oppressive colonized world made her great-grandparents’, grandparents’ and even parents’ generations fiercely protective of their stories. But now, she says, things are beginning to change.

“I think we’re at this crucial moment in society when we’re seeing so many crises, like climate change,” Taffa says, “and I think that everyone can benefit from hearing Native stories and learning more about Native values.”

She recognizes her story shares common threads with thousands of Indigenous people, writing in Whiskey Tender that “so many people could tell this story, it is shocking how rarely it has been told.”

But Taffa lends the story her own specificity of language and rendering of memory, her innate curiosity and intuition leading her to peel back the layers of missing and misinformation.

She had amassed decades of notes and hours of recorded interviews by the time she sat down to write, including notes from her time living on the Quechan reservation with her husband and kids in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when she would go to the Arizona Historical Society to read about tribal history and politics on microfiche. She spent time interviewing her great aunts, who had been involved in tribal governments and were welders during World War II, and recorded 14 hours of interviews with her parents.

When she came to IAIA in 2021, she realized she’d lucked into one of her greatest resources: the college’s library, which houses one of the best collections of Native histories in the country. Taffa’s office is just across the Dance Circle from the library, and it was there that she was able to confirm much of what she’d learned from family lore.

“When I went to the library I found all of this evidence that these memories were real—it was just incredible,” Taffa says. “It feels to me like my ancestors were watching out for me.”

Still, Whiskey Tender was “incredibly difficult to write,” she says, particularly in revisiting the trauma and racism of her childhood in Farmington. She aimed to distill complex histories into compelling, colloquial language so readers can enjoy the story while absorbing the history.

“I wanted it to go more towards [Reservation] Dogs,” Taffa says, “because otherwise you’re gonna get a lot of white academics who read the book and your own kids are gonna be bored by it.”

She recalls speaking with students at Haskell Indian Nations University about Whiskey Tender, which made her realize why she wrote it in the first place:

“The meaning of this entire thing for me is Native futures,” Taffa says. “If your family has struggles, it’s easy to imagine those struggles are some sort of moral failing on their part. If your schools don’t teach you your own history, you know something’s wrong, but you can’t understand—why can’t your family just pull themselves up by their bootstraps? Why do you feel so sad? Why is it so difficult? But when you gain a knowledge of history, you are so much more empowered to confront your life, because you understand how things came to be the way they are.”