Whiskey Tender

Whiskey Tender is a 2024 memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa, who is Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo. Winner of the Southwest Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, Whiskey Tender tells the story of Taffa’s coming of age as a young Indigenous girl growing up in mainstream America. Throughout the text, Taffa blends historical context from the colonization of the United States and the systemic erasure of Indigenous people with her own childhood stories from growing up on the California Yuma reservation and in Farmington, New Mexico, in the 1970s and 1980s. As a young girl with mixed Yuma heritage, Taffa struggled to find a sense of belonging and fought against her family and society’s insistence that she forget her Indigenous history and culture. Exploring themes like the personal and collective journey of cultural preservation and the effects of assimilation policies on Indigenous communities, Whiskey Tender is a story about having the courage to define one’s identity on their own terms. 

This guide refers to the 2024 HarperCollins Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of racism, death, child death, illness, suicidal ideation, mental illness, physical abuse, addiction, substance use, and cursing. In particular, they discuss anti-Indigenous racism, forced cultural assimilation, forced relocation, enslavement, and genocide.

Language Note: The source material uses the term “Indian” to refer to Indigenous Americans; this term is replicated in the guide only in quotations.

Summary

Deborah Jackson Taffa was born on the Yuma reservation in 1969. Her father, Edmond Jackson, was of mixed tribal heritage—Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo—and her mother, Lorraine Lopez Herrera, came from a Hispanic Catholic family that either forgot or denied their Indigenous roots. Both had large families, and Taffa’s early childhood consisted of roughhousing with her sisters, surrounded by many aunts, uncles, and cousins. Shortly after Lorraine and Edmond married, Edmond took advantage of a program called the Indian Relocation Act, which offered job training to Indigenous people willing to move to big cities. The Bureau of Indian Affairs paid for Edmond and Lorraine to move to Phoenix, Arizona, where Edmond enrolled in welding school. However, when the “fancy” job that had been promised didn’t materialize, they moved back to the reservation.

Edmond worked long hours at several different jobs to make ends meet in Yuma. Finally, in 1976, Edmond found a position as a welder at a power plant on the Navajo reservation, and the family moved to Farmington, New Mexico. Although Taffa had no idea at the time, Farmington was a “town where cowboys still hated Indians” (6), and racial tensions and violence were so high that the town was nicknamed “the Selma, Alabama, of the Southwest” (104). Blissfully unaware, Taffa spent the summer before her first year of Catholic school happily memorizing the presidents of the United States, hoping to impress her new classmates. Her favorite was Andrew Jackson because they shared a last name. She had no idea that he was nicknamed “Indian Killer.”

Taffa’s parents taught her that working hard in school was the best way to “overcome [their] circumstances” (136), and Taffa began Catholic school determined to prove to her teachers that she could “conquer” her “feral” Indigenous side. However, when a teacher accused her of cheating on a test, she doubted that any amount of hard work would make certain people see her as anything but Indigenous. Taffa also began longing for a deeper connection to her Indigenous culture. She missed life on the Yuma reservation and resented the pressure from her family and society to assimilate and forget her heritage.

Farmington was situated on the edge of the huge Navajo reservation. The other Indigenous children in Taffa’s classes were often full-blood Navajos with robust culture and traditions, and Taffa often felt like they judged her for being too white. However, she also didn’t feel like she fit in with other white children, and she felt terribly guilty when she sometimes “passed” as white.

By the time she reached high school, Taffa had given up on academia. She “resented the absence of Native wisdom and culture in [her] formal education” and only felt “uplifted” when she could “explore the very culture and the history that [her] parents wanted [her] to leave behind” (245-46). She learned more about Indigenous American culture and history on her own time, and the more she learned, the angrier she became over the atrocities her ancestors suffered and how that history was kept from her. Her grades suffered, and she began indulging in risky behavior like drinking and driving. Taffa’s feelings of rage, depression, and uselessness culminated in an attempt to die by suicide before her senior year of high school. After taking a bottle of Tylenol, Taffa knew that she didn’t want to die, and her sister rushed her to the hospital.

Taffa’s suicide attempt brought her pain and rage into the open, which was relieving, but she still struggled to find the words to discuss her feelings. Nevertheless, she was determined to “get rid of the shame” that was instilled in her over generations and “make self-love [her] primary goal” (267). She recommitted herself to school and graduated with the rest of her class. She was determined to forgo college and dreamed of returning to the reservation and immersing herself in her culture and history. She was critical of her parents for leaving the reservation behind and living a mainstream life; however, thinking of how she “hated when other Natives policed [her] identity” and treated her “like [she] was too assimilated” (282), she realized that she had done the same to her parents. They made their own way and found their own “method of survival,” and Taffa had to discover her own.

After graduating high school, Taffa took a summer job at Yellowstone and then spent two years traveling across the country and the world, learning about Indigenous people as she traveled. By her mid-twenties, she returned to Yuma, “strong, straightened out, and ready to help” (285).