In “Whiskey Tender: A Memoir,” writer Deborah Jackson Taffa tells the story of her family’s transition from life on a Native American reservation in Yuma to a volatile border town in New Mexico. Along the way, she blends her own history with the painful realities of racism, police violence and forced assimilation that have plagued generations of Native families.
As Taffa prepared to write the book, which took her 20 years to finish, she knew it would be important to illustrate the narrative with pivotal scenes from her youth.
Taffa joined The Show to discuss the very first memory that came to mind when she started writing.
Full conversation
DEBORAH JACKSON TAFFA: The one that came to shape I think though quick, quickly and was the thing that I first saw in the book was my uncle Johnny's funeral. I was old enough at that point that I remembered much of it. The bird singers, the richness of the traditional experience kind of in contrast to what had become by that point a mainstream life for me because I was attending a Catholic school. The aboutness though of a chapter is always elusive, like figuring out beyond the anecdote, what is the deeper meaning in this. That was harder to come by.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, well, you have a teacher at that time, if I'm not mistaken, who kind of talks to your class about what it means to engage with death. And the teacher's version of what that is, ends up standing in really stark contrast to your experience, and it becomes a way for you of realizing this way that you're stuck between all these, these worlds.
TAFFA: Yes, Sam, that is a very good read. I mean, I think the thing that is comes into relief in that chapter is the poverty of the rituals that are a part of post-industrial society, like the coming of age ritual of getting a driver's license replaces these profound Indigenous coming of age rituals that I would have had if my ancestors had maintained their culture.
And death is one of these things that becomes very watered down. And the beauty of Indigenous rituals and the beauty of the cremation ceremony to me made such a big impact. It was, it was probably the moment in my life where I knew I was facing a choice whether or not I would find meaning in my life via American culture. Or whether I was gonna bend towards an appreciation for my Indigenous traditions, and I hope came through in the chapter, yeah.
DINGMAN: Absolutely. Well, one of the things I really appreciated about that moment in the in the story is that there's actually a lot of nuance in terms of the cultural clash that's happening there because the nun/teacher that you have at that time is sort of appalled to discover that a lot of the kids in your class have never been to a funeral before.
And she tells a very personal story about the death of her sister, but she tells it from the standpoint of death is something you should be exposed to so that you can just get over the fact that it's gonna bring up big feelings and and put those feelings away.
And then you tell your story of going to a funeral where In a way it's a similar ethos. It's, it's not hiding death from young people, you're there for it, right. But it's very much about experiencing the feeling. It's very much about the momentousness of the emotion.
TAFFA: It is. There are designated criers and it's a way for you to purge the, the pain and these sort of, the confrontation of death becomes something that is expressed so that that illness and that grief can leave your body rather than kind of balling it up inside and carrying it around in a way that's unhealthy. And the interesting thing about the nun in that year when I was in school was how wounded she still felt because she felt complicit in her little sister's death.
SAM DINGMAN: But you're also hitting on something else that comes up, not to dwell too much on it, but also comes up in this particular chapter that I am keen to ask you about, which is another thing that happens when you get to this Catholic school is that you get recognized for your storytelling abilities.
You give a recitation in front of the class, and I think it's a different teacher pulls you aside and says you were, you were excellent at that, and I'd like to have you get up in front of the entire school and do this recitation of Paul Revere's ride, which is obviously a very patriotic American story.
So it's, it's this interesting moment where you're, you're being recognized as somebody with the capacity to tell stories in an impactful way, but the opportunity that you're given is to tell this story that has nothing to do with your own community's history and culture.
TAFFA: Right. It was a version of American history that is told and kind of exclude the country's origin story and the contributions of my ancestors.
DINGMAN: One of the other elements of that in my mind is how perceptive you were as a child. I'm thinking in particular about, there's a moment where you walk in and your dad is listening to a Richard Pryor record, and even though you're too young to understand the references that Richard Pryor is making, there's something about the way that he's reacting to the jokes on the record that you just kind of have this instinctive understanding that there's there's more happening than what you are maybe processing in a literal way.
TAFFA: As a child, the adults around me, they had such strong emotions. Everything was heightened, you know, when you, when you come from a community that is struggling. You don't have sort of a daily status quo where things are rote and habitual. You have a lot of mood swings and the energy that comes off of parents and relatives and neighbors, the, the painful aspects of their existence.
It's, it's hard to miss as a child, and so you develop a way of being on your toes because you're never sure what's going to happen next. In a community that suffers from pain and violence, it's actually crucial to your survival.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I, I hadn't thought about that before, but that, that makes so much sense. I mean, there's just so much dynamic energy in the air all the time in an unstable household. That if you have your antenna up, it, it's just like there's constantly an invitation for you to try to make sense of it somehow.
TAFFA: That's exactly it. You put it very well, yeah. And again, I think it's also tribal values very much speak to my desire to serve my community. And throughout my life, it's been really difficult to juggle those two oppositional value systems, how to pursue the American dream in a way that felt ethical as an Indigenous person.
I hope that's what the book ultimately portrays is the very difficult questions that we as Indigenous people face to make our peace with being American citizens.
