Whiskey Tender

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, death, child death, illness, mental illness, physical abuse, substance use, and cursing.

Part 1 opens with a vignette describing the author Deborah Jackson Taffa’s return to the reservation for her mother’s funeral. As her father drives behind the van carrying her mother’s body, Taffa dreams that they are driving through a sandstorm. When the storm ends, she gets out of the car and walks toward the water—a mirage—she can see in the distance. She wakes with the knowledge that she can no longer be “a ghost child in love with, and afraid of, mirages” (4).

When Taffa was young, her family moved from the Yuma reservation in California to Farmington, New Mexico. Leaving the reservation was often considered “a betrayal,” but Taffa’s father, Edmond Jackson, chose to pursue his career, and he and Taffa’s mother, Lorraine Lopez Herrera, raised their children as “mainstream Americans.” Taffa’s childhood was often full of “challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy” (6), but she romanticizes happy childhood memories like playing in the river with her family. She insists that her story is “common.” However, Indigenous memoirs are unusual because “[t]alking to outsiders is taboo” (7).