Whiskey Tender: A Memoir

A propulsive and clear-sighted memoir, reminiscent of Maya Angelou’s joyous yet difficult coming-of-age classic, this story of a mixed-tribe Indigenous family explores the balancing act required of a child who stands with one foot in mainstream America and the other in the wisdom of her ancestry.“We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this. 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.”—Tommy Orange, author of There There

Deborah Jackson Taffa examines the many forces that shaped who she is. An extraordinary, hardworking father, a complicated, beautiful mother, and her own bullheaded, indomitable spirit. Raised in the wake of hard assimilation policies, Deborah knows she should be grateful—her ancestors survived genocide, her grandparents survived mandatory boarding schools, her father survived discriminatory incarceration as a minor—but coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s was not easy. After Deborah’s father is trained as a welder, the family is moved from their home reservation to a violent border town on the Navajo Nation, where Deborah and her sisters are pushed to be model minorities by demanding parents determined to see them excel and transcend the institutional poverty and “Indian” status of their births.A memoir of exquisite detail and honesty, Whiskey Tender renders the American West through a unique lens as it captures Deborah’s struggle to reconcile her tribal history with the concept of upward mobility, and how the family must come together when tragedy strikes. Replete with sharp meditations on tribal myths, the Indigenous rights movement, intertribal relations, and the tensions between spiritual and financial needs, the book is a revelatory tale that exposes the compromises and sacrifices Indigenous families continue to face.

About the Author

Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her MFA at the Nonfiction Writing Program (NWP) in Iowa City and is the director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, the Huffington Post, Prairie Schooner, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other outlets.