Yes, But Who Am I?

“Whiskey Tender” is Deborah Jackson Taffa’s search for her identity as a mixed tribe native girl. Her father is Quechan/Laguna, and her mother is a devout Hispanic Catholic. This is not a story of a girl soaking in the stories handed down by her family, she had to fight through their reluctance to speak of the things they had endured: tales of the treatment suffered in the Indian residential boarding schools and, as she said, “...the shame: the silence that follows an apocalypse.”

In addition to the struggles for support within the family, her identity was beset by social confusion. Born on the Yuma, California Reservation, the family moved to Farmington, New Mexico, where her father could find the work he was trained for. Leaving the reservation was tantamount to betrayal or desertion in the eyes of her father’s people. Farmington is on the northeast border of the Navajo Nation and there was a resistance against full acceptance of Quechan blood and tradition. The Hispanic population did not see Deborah’s family as their own, either. As for the white attitude, Farmington had just been the scene of protests following the “Indian rolling” kidnapping and murdering of three native men by three high school students.

This confusing attempt to grasp identity while being sent mixed signals reminded me of “If I Survive You” by Jonathan Escofferey, a novel shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. A main theme of that book involves the denial of acceptance by those the protagonist is drawn to. Escoffery’s character is a young Jamaican immigrant, rejected by Jamaican islanders just as soundly as he is rejected by every other group in his new home.

This is a fascinating portrait of where Native Americans look to find themselves today, told through one woman’s coming of age in an America which has tried so hard to whitewash out her heritage. I love the relationship she conveys with her father. I am touched by the distance she and her mother try so hard to bridge. A wonderful book addressing life from the family to the nation.

Thank you to Harper Books and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #WhiskeyTender #NetGalley

Deborah Taffa's memoir WHISKEY TENDER is superb.

The way Taffa blends Indigenous history with her personal story is very effective. I thought I knew the wrongs the U.S. government inflicted on Indigenous tribes, but I didn't (and do not) know all the insidious ways state and local governments made things more horrific. I appreciate her willingness to include this history in her memoir. As the reader cares about young Deb and her family, the acts of the government feel very close, very personal.

I'll be recommending this book to everyone I know. It's a beautifully written and I hope to read more by Taffa. I'm also going to use WHISKEY TENDER as an example of how memoir can also address aspects of history and social justice with my writing students.

Deborah Jackson Taffa gives us an inside look into her life as she tries to find where she fits in and reconcile her ancestral past with her present. Deborah struggles to find and keep her tribal identity while "assimilating" into the melting pot that is America. It was a hard look at racism, entitlement, cultural assumptions along with a need to survive and a desire to succeed.

My thanks to NetGalley and Harper for the advanced ecopy of this book.

A unique memoir that I would recommend to most anyone. This memoir did an excellent job of dropping the reader into a specific place and time and digging deep into Taffa's tension lines along different facets of her identify - such as religion, tribal culture, and race.
I appreciated her diving into the complexities of her relationship with her Quechan culture and family and how she didn't shy away from discussing tensions between herself and members of other tribal communities. These accounts serve as an important reminder of the danger of non-Natives seeing Native culture as homogeneous and not acknowledging the many diverse cultures and identities within the Native community.
While I enjoyed the entire read - the latter third did grow heavy and at first I felt it was becoming too repetitive. But I came to realize that what I had perceived as repetition was in fact Taffa trying to convey an incredible, all consuming pain. That pain proved to be transformative and it was heart warming to learn of how Taffa found connection to her identity by spending time outdoors.

*Thank you so much to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the chance to review an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.*

Absolutely fascinating memoir told from the intersections of race, indigenous culture and politics. An important part of Taffa's memoir was place. Her descriptions about landscapes, their meaning to her as an individual and larger indigenous cluture were told so beautifully. You're transported often. Highly recommend for any memoir lover, but also those seeking to gain a deeper understanding of generational trauma, indigenious culture and a recontextualization of American history.

This is the best memoir I've read in maybe the last 5 years. Taffa tells a story that is so moving and so important and I hope everyone, literally, everyone, reads Whiskey Tender.

I am so grateful to Deborah Taffa for gifting us with Whiskey Tender and her life story. Taffa is my age, and yet her formative years were so different from my own - growing up "half-breed" with grandparents who were born to the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe, a mother who was raised Catholic, and a father raised in the Native American traditions. From the perspective of a girl growing up among so many different worlds, Taffa explores the difficult issues of reconciliation, assimilation, segregation and tradition. This memoir is educative and evocative and an important addition to an ugly (and still unresolved) chapter of American history.

Whiskey Tender is “born of nostalgia,” that acute longing for home, which Deborah Jackson Taffa’s Laguna Grandmother, Esther, taught her is the forebear of most “recitation, poetry, and writing” (279). Because, as Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko said, “it’s only in a state of nostalgia that we can see things clearly” (280). Home is a geography of relationships blended with time, which Taffa considers, as she writes, from a distance.

Taffa's memoir follows a chronological line, which traces her own childhood maturation. While personal change intersects with doggedly researched intergenerational dimensions of “post-apocalyptic difficulties we were enduring” (200) as a family with heritages including Laguna Pueblo, Quechan (Yuma), Shoshone-Paiute, and Spanish and Genízaro (kidnapped and enslaved Native persons engulfed by Spanish colonialism).

Taffa’s story of persistent harms by gaslighting institutions and policies rooted in genocidal intentions of Spanish and other European colonizers and of persistent Indigenous survival and collective continuance is an if not "the" iconic American one (16). While to stay alive, personally, Taffa is driven to puzzle together – and, gratefully, share – history that has been structurally rent, grossly simplified, lied about, and buried by colonial-assimilationist policies like white-washed, hegemonic school and church programming and Native relocation policies tearing apart kinship and ceremony and imposing shame. Taffa, for instance, inherits “two versions of oppression” internalized by her parents (142) – her “light-skinned” Spanish/Genízaro mom’s “inferiority complex with whites” and her darker-skinned Laguna-Quechan-Paiute dad’s feelings of lower status as a displaced “breed” of “mixed tribe” compared with “full-blood” Diné (Navajo) (26).

If nostalgia is its forebear, anger feels like a living heart in Taffa’s memoir, one who fleshes out into full-blown “rage...against the fear this country has of its own history” (209). This rage, for a season, turns inward with its underlying pain of violent injustice – of broken treaties, thefts, muzzlings, and/or woundings of the very conditions of home – of land, kin, identity and belonging, norms of “success,” truths of languages and stories, and of Quechan dream traditions – and almost, but, gratefully, does not kill the author. The need to reassemble herself with the courage to replace shame with self-love and to attune with ancestral undercurrents of reconnective strength and lands’ music, wherever she may be – longing for the desert and dwelling within it – is steadying.

I do not feel, as a white settler, alienated by her story, as she hoped we would not (16). Rather, I resonate with the lasting tones of Taffa’s just anger alongside celebration. I feel invited into my own nostalgia to see, with clarity, my need to unweave personal home-longing from complicity with systemic home-taking. I feel called into solidarity with Taffa’s light flooding the still- “too many dark corners in America “(16) and into better worlds-making.

Maybe other readers of Taffa’s necessary and brilliant work will be similarly moved. I also hope that many educators will integrate Whiskey Tender into curricula across the U.S. and beyond.

I honestly don’t know where to start on everything that I was able to learn thanks to Deborah Tafa’s personal narrative and the way that it seamlessly blends her personal story and family history with plentiful amounts of general Native American history and Native American history pertaining specifically to the American southwest. “Whisky Tender” ended up providing quite the hefty education that I immediately valued immensely, speaking as someone whose own education about indigenous Americans wasn’t so much an education as it was a nearly total lack of one. I appreciated the way that Taffa managed to expose my now-glaring knowledge gaps on numerous indigenous-related matters that I wasn’t even aware of before promptly proceeding to give me a helpful foundation to filling them in.

However, even by some miracle I had been able to go into this book already completely up to date on the aforementioned, I still would have treasured reading it all the same. It’s still a beautifully honest and open memoir about growing up and trying to navigate the sharp disconnect between a white-centric mainstream culture, the so-called American dream and her own native identity. Also, speaking as a descendant of European settlers and immigrants - the country as Taffa has lived it and as I have lived it so far are extremely different experiences (and that’s such an understatement that it almost feels like a crime). And it’s not often that I get the valuable opportunity to get at least a glimpse into this part of America, much less one so very deeply intimate.

“Whisky Tender” is definitely one of my favorite nonfiction reads of 2023, and one of my favorite reads of the year in general - and in my opinion, it’s now an absolute must-have for the shelves of my local public library and the academic library where I work.