Whiskey Tender

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

Taffa describes being “in a waking dream” on the Navajo reservation (243). She is in a teepee with a circle of elders, and a Cheyenne medicine man called Blackbear passes peyote around the circle. The mashed cacti is sour as Taffa puts it in her mouth. The ceremony is “purifying” her, connecting her to the land and her history, healing “over twenty years of collected trauma” (243). The night after the ceremony, she dreams that Grandfather Peyote hugs her so tightly that she “become[s] something new” when she can breathe again (244).

By her junior year of high school, Taffa’s motto became “screw academia.” After years of trying to make her parents and teachers proud by working hard in school, Taffa felt trapped and longed to immerse herself in “the very culture and the history that [her] parents wanted [her] to leave behind” (246). She was learning more about Indigenous history on her own time and growing increasingly frustrated with “the absence of Native wisdom and culture in [her] formal education” (246). With her grades dropping, college seemed less and less likely, and Taffa was “tired of fighting the system” anyway (246).