Whiskey Tender

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism, death, child death, and substance use.

Taffa dreams that she is strapped into a chair on a space shuttle. She holds hands with a stranger as they disembark and are greeted with a welcome ceremony. People from numerous Indigenous nations pound drums and dance together. When she looks up, she sees Earth through the glass ceiling, and part of the planet explodes. Taffa tries to pull her hand away, insisting that she has to go home. Instead, the stranger pulls her toward the dancers. Taffa feels afraid; she looks down, and her hand is wrinkled like an old woman’s.

Out of 22 students in Taffa’s new second-grade classroom, she was one of three Indigenous children. Taffa didn’t like Cherie, a Ute girl, from the moment she met her, but Robert, a Navajo boy, interested her. When she told her father about him, he reminded her to call him Diné; he had learned from his Navajo coworkers that this was their original tribal name. One day in class, a boy called Billy was solving math problems on the blackboard. When the teacher became impatient, Billy began hyperventilating, turning white and then blue.