Whiskey Tender

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

Whiskey Tender is a story about the damage of the US government’s assimilation policies on directly affected Indigenous Americans as well as subsequent generations. Because of how assimilation policies affected her parents and grandparents, Taffa was raised as a mainstream American girl. Her skin was light enough to pass for white, and her family and society encouraged her to take advantage of this privilege. However, as Taffa got older, she realized that she “wanted more than the Western world could offer” (208), but through centuries of oppression and assimilation policies, “the government had wiped [their] generational memories clean” (208). The culture and history that Taffa was desperate to connect to were no longer valued or easily accessible, generating feelings of rage and devastation that led to Taffa’s suicide attempt. Her crisis was not just personal but historical, as it mirrored the collective loss experienced by many Indigenous people struggling to reclaim identities systematically stripped away.

Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States began concerted efforts to disappear Indigenous American populations by forcing them to adopt European-style customs, language, and religion and incorporate themselves into mainstream American culture.