Whiskey tender : a memoir / Deborah Jackson Taffa.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A Zibby Mag "Most Anticipated Book" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book to Cozy Up With" * A Publishers Weekly "Memoirs & Biographies: Top 10" * The Millions "Most Anticipated" * An Electric Lit "Books By Women of Color to Read"

"We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this. Whiskey Tender is unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told, like a drink you didn't know you were thirsty for. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history. It pulses and it aches, and it lifts, consistently. It threads together so much truth by the time we are done, what has been woven together equals a kind of completeness from brokenness, and a hope from knowing love and loss and love again by naming it so." -- Tommy Orange, National Bestselling Author of There There

Reminiscent of the works of Mary Karr and Terese Marie Mailhot, a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.

Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents--citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe--were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the "American Dream."

Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl--born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico--comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent's desires for her to transcend the class and "Indian" status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe's particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa's childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.

Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present--the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations--she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the "melting pot" of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• [] (3)
• Animas (5)
• Almost Yuman (10)
• The Price is Right (28)
• Not Your Indian Outlaw (45)
• The Phantom Limb (59)
• Bicentennial Girl (79)
• [] (97)
• Crowned (99)
• First Funeral (115)
• Pancake Alley (128)
• Boarding School (143)
• [] (161)
• Hall of Mirrors (163)
• Lab Work (180)
• All Saints (195)
• Pocahottie (209)
• The Woman Who Was a Mirage (225)
• [] (243)
• The Ghost Dance (245)
• Flight (264)
• Epilogue (287)
• Acknowledgments (291)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Taffa, the director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, debuts with a poignant and harrowing account of growing up in the 1980s as a "Native girl in a northwestern New Mexico town where cowboys still hated Indians." In vivid, nonlinear passages, Taffa describes her childhood, focusing especially on her complex relationships with her parents, who were raised on reservations and had aspirations of assimilation for Taffa and her siblings. Taffa's father, Edmond Jackson, was often in trouble with the law, most notably after his involvement in a fatal car accident; her mother, Lorraine Lopez Herrera, had such all-consuming depression that Taffa feared being home alone with her. Neither parent explored the history of Native American oppression in-depth with Taffa, who researched that history on her own as an adolescent and began to sour on the American Dream she'd grown up idealizing. Throughout, she's careful not to depict her circumstances as unique: "My story is as common as dirt," she writes. "Thousands of Native Americans in California, Arizona, and New Mexico could tell it." What makes Taffa's version exceptional is her visceral prose and sharp attunement to the tragedies of assimilation. This is a must-read. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt. (Feb.)

Booklist Review

Taffa recounts her childhood and teenage years in New Mexico during the 1970s and '80s. A citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo, she threads together intimate family troubles--her mother's depression, her father's alcoholism--with highly charged historical accounts, such as when California vigilantes in 1851 "killed 100,000 of my ancestors in the first two years of the gold rush." In doing so, Taffa unravels the traumas carried across generations, and situates her story within a colonial and national history of injustice, exploitation, and dispossession. She also writes of fierce resistance, from the Pueblo revolt of 1680 to her own confrontations with prejudice due to her mixed Indigenous heritage. For all its intensity and weight, the telling is not without joyous moments: dancing to the Temptations with her mother, or perched atop a plateau with her father, their ancestral homelands stretching to the horizon. Yet violence lurks beneath the surface, and arresting passages punctuate the narrative: "A father's job was to control the pace of the world's wounding, to dole out the pain in slightly bigger doses over time." The result of a lifetime, Taffa's remarkable debut stands out from other contemporary memoirs and Native American literature.

Kirkus Book Review

A woman with both Native American and Spanish bloodlines seeks to understand the identities at her core. Taffa, a member of the Yuma Nation and Laguna Pueblo, is the editor-in-chief of River Styx magazine and director of the MFA creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Like many Native people, she and her family have faced a concerted effort to remove them from the land, customs, and culture that are their inheritance. In the 1970s, the author's parents made a pointed, if tortured, decision to leave their Quechan family to pursue economic security and some level of assimilation for their children. Spending her childhood and adolescence on the precipice of risk, experiencing anger, resentment, and grief both personal and systemic, Taffa established her claim to her mixed-tribe Native identity. While she asserts that her story is, in ways, as "common as dirt," her narration is both illuminating and instructive. With Native blood and roots that reach to the Spanish conquistadors, the author's experience exposes little-known aspects of the Spanish-Indigenous relationship and the complex nature of intertribal competition and collaboration. She carefully incorporates years of diligent research to reveal unknown or underappreciated facts of history--such as the responses of Native Americans during World War II--highlighting the intricacies of both her family history and the more summarily acknowledged mistreatment of Indigenous groups. Amid such details, the emotional power and cohesion of the author's own narrative can get lost, but Taffa's work is a testament to the power of and need for intergenerational storytelling and a reminder that neither the history, identity, nor future of Native Americans is a monolith. She succeeds in creating a memorable celebration of "our survival as a culture, as well as the hope, strength, and grace of my family." A searching and perceptive Native memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.