Deborah Jackson Taffa, director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, interrogates her childhood both on and off the reservation in her unflinching memoir, Whiskey Tender.
Native memoirs are rare, she writes, for several reasons, one of which is the question of who has the right to speak. Questions of who speaks, which stories get told, and who tells them haunt the pages of this densely woven debut. Taffa spends her childhood beseeching her father for stories of their ancestors. It's a tough task, especially because their family's languages, Yuma and Keres, have been lost between generations and many of her ancestors died young.
Longing to find one's place in the world is well-trodden territory. But Taffa's quest is brutally complicated by her mixed heritage and her hostile surroundings. Not only must she contend with an oppressive outside world, vividly depicted in her Catholic and public school years, but also within her own family she struggles to find her place. She describes her father as admiring full-blooded Indians, while her Hispanic mother, raised as an obedient Catholic and one of 15 children, would rather Taffa pass as white. Taffa seeks Indigenous traditions while facing her mother's vehement disapproval.
Episodes from Taffa's childhood and family history are interspersed with tyrannous government policies enacted throughout the years against Native Americans. Whiskey Tender is both a survival story and a reckoning, as well as an ode to a family striving valiantly and tragically to gain footing in racist, hostile America. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator