Whiskey Tender

By her junior year of high school, Taffa’s motto became “screw academia.” After years of trying to make her parents and teachers proud by working hard in school, Taffa felt trapped and longed to immerse herself in “the very culture and the history that [her] parents wanted [her] to leave behind” (246). She was learning more about Indigenous history on her own time and growing increasingly frustrated with “the absence of Native wisdom and culture in [her] formal education” (246). With her grades dropping, college seemed less and less likely, and Taffa was “tired of fighting the system” anyway (246).

Joan had dropped out of college to become a manager at Domino’s Pizza, and she got Taffa a job in the kitchen, where she hung out with older kids and spent her money on marijuana and alcohol. She was often engaging in risky behavior, riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle without a helmet, drinking, and speeding when she drove. One morning while getting high in the canyon, Taffa realized that this tendency toward risk and self-harm was “a family tradition”; it was their “twentieth-century battle cry,” but Taffa knew that “there was a thin line between courage and stupidity” (249). Despite this realization, Taffa couldn’t truly “internalize” what this meant for her and her family.

The next weekend, Taffa went with Joan, her sister’s boyfriend, and a fellow Domino’s employee called Larry to a bar in Durango about an hour away. Everyone was drunk by the time they left, and Larry insisted that Taffa be the designated driver. She repeatedly dozed off as she drove the mountainous roads home, and the next morning, she barely remembered the trip. They spent the following day nursing hangovers until it was late enough to start drinking again. Larry’s girlfriend and their baby daughter came to Joan’s apartment, along with Stefan, another co-worker from Domino’s. Larry and Stefan often flirted, and Taffa could see that he was uncomfortable being with Larry’s girlfriend and daughter. Taffa didn’t want to drink more, so she asked Stefan to take her out to get some food.

Meanwhile, “all hell began breaking loose at Joan’s” (252). Larry pretended to play Russian roulette with a pistol, but when he pulled the trigger, the blank shattered his skull and forced a bone fragment into his brain, killing him. Edmond fretted since they had moved away from the reservation “to protect [their children] from violence like this” (253). He worried that Taffa was losing her sense of “purpose” and urged her to set clearer goals.

After Larry’s funeral, Taffa’s first class was American humanities, where her teacher assigned Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. It was the first time Taffa was assigned a nonfiction text “that pertained to [her] life” (255), and she stayed up all night reading. She was shocked and devastated by the extent of the atrocities committed against Indigenous populations and heartbroken by Indigenous peoples’ attempts “to prove they were civilized and deserved to stay on their land” (255). She was consumed by the dawning realization that she and her ancestors “were a persecuted people” and wondered why her parents had never shared this (256). Her father wasn’t home, so she knocked on her mother’s door, desperate to talk. Lorraine answered, furious that Taffa woke her little brother, and sent her back to bed.

On Friday, Taffa’s humanities teacher started the class discussion on Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by asking Christian, the only visibly Indigenous student in the class, to share his thoughts. The teacher “made no attempt to contextualize [the] discussion” or consider what “the mental health impact [of] the lesson” might have been (258). Christian told the class that his mother had taught him forgiveness, and Taffa was frustrated that he didn’t share his anger. As the rest of Taffa’s classmates chimed in, she “suffered in silence,” upset that she “lacked the courage to stand up and defend [her] ancestors” (259).

The next day, Taffa was home alone, feeling “like a coward and a traitor” (259). Anxious “to numb the pain,” she locked herself in the bathroom (259), swallowed an entire bottle of Tylenol, and fell asleep in the bathtub. She woke up later, suddenly afraid, and stumbled to Monica’s room. Her sister rushed her to the hospital, where she stayed for a week. A psychiatrist came to talk with Taffa, but she struggled to find words to describe the grief and anger she felt. Later, Taffa’s mother sat with her and told her about walking home hungry as a small child. She saw a cherry tree in front of a house and ate the fruit until a man came out and accused her of stealing. She cried while telling Taffa the story, and Taffa understood that it represented “sharing some sort of genesis” of her mother’s pain (262), but she couldn’t understand it clearly.

The next day, her father visited. He attended a leadership conference where a half-Indigenous, half-Chicano man spoke “about how alienated he felt, never able to fit in either world” (263). Edmond apologized and admitted that he had always been thankful that Taffa was “light-skinned and pretty and smart,” not realizing that she might struggle with being “a half-breed” (263). Taffa appreciated the apology, but most of her grief stemmed from “the despicable way [her] ancestors’ ideas had been bled out of [a contemporary] approach to life” (263).

The summer after Taffa’s suicide attempt, her family stayed close to her. Taffa insisted that she was relieved to have her grief “in the open” (264), but her family watched her closely. Edmond invited her to go fishing every weekend, Monica asked her to hang out with her friends, and Joan and Lori spent time at the house. They spent the summer reminiscing about their childhood and going on family camping trips. Taffa and her sisters remembered playing a game where they hit each other with a belt, and Taffa realized how “the world had already taught [them] to accept a beating and brace [them]selves for pain” (266). She promised herself that she would “get rid of the shame” and “make self-love [her] primary goal” (267).

Taffa appreciated her family’s support, but she still longed for a deeper connection to her culture. The summer with her sisters motivated her to escape Farmington with her “[c]hin up rather than head down” (269). She hoped to return to Yuma instead of attending college, but she was still determined to graduate. She enlisted a team of tutors and got ready for her first day of school like “a warrior preparing for battle” (270).

Partway through the spring semester, however, tragedy struck their family when Lori was involved in a serious car accident. She was day drinking with friends from college and went home “with a frat boy who drove like a maniac” (273). He rear-ended a truck, and Lori had to be extricated from the crash with hydraulic rescue tools. Edmond and Lorraine wanted to leave for the hospital right away, but the emergency room doctor urged them to stay put in case they needed to reach them for emergency surgery authorization. The next morning, Lori was stabilized but in a coma, and Edmond and Lorraine began the seven-hour drive to Las Cruces, New Mexico.

When Monica and Taffa came to visit, Lori was barely recognizable in the intensive care unit. Taffa was surprised to find her mother furious, warning her that she was “one impulsive moment” away from becoming “a statistic” (275). She reminded Taffa about the time when Edmond swam across the river while running from some police officers. He planned on hiding in Granny Ethel’s fry bread trailer, but when he touched it while he was soaking wet, faulting wiring caused him to be electrocuted. Hearing the story again, Taffa realized that her father was alive because Lorraine “had never backed down or abandoned him, even when he did stupid things” (276). She thought of everything her mother had given up for her family and regretted treating her with resentment. She understood that Lorraine’s commitment to her faith wasn’t “dumb” but rather the source of her strength.

Taffa found her father in the chapel. She confessed the guilt that she felt while listening to Lorraine speak, but Edmond insisted that she didn’t have to apologize for her anger. He told her that her need to connect more with their culture had “forced them to face issues they couldn’t confront as a couple before” and “made them realize they couldn’t keep pretending their kids’ societal struggles didn’t exist” (277). Taffa “wasn’t ready to forgive America for its racism” (278), but she was beginning to understand that her parents’ faith was a symbol of their strength and perseverance.

Lori woke up after Monica and Taffa had returned to Farmington. The family was relieved, but the lasting consequences of the accident became apparent. Lori couldn’t remember the accident, but she also had no memory of Yuma. When she finished her rehabilitation, the doctor advised the family to take a trip home to spark her memory, so they went to the reservation, visiting their “old haunts” and reminiscing about their childhood. When Aunt Vi learned that Taffa was thinking of returning home, she shook her head. Taffa wondered why Vi hadn’t been interested in learning about her culture, and she told the younger woman that things were “different” for her generation since “everyone was scarred from Indian boarding school” (281). She reminded Taffa that her father worked hard to give her and her sisters “a good life” and urged her to “act like” she appreciated his sacrifices (281).

On the way home from Yuma, Taffa thought about what her aunt said. She realized that she had been angry at her parents for things that were not their fault. Even though it upset her when other Indigenous people treated her like she “was too assimilated” (282), she had been “judging” her parents in the same way. She realized that the life her parents lived was their own “method of survival” and that she had to make her own way (282).

One of Taffa’s teachers had shared a life-changing experience working in Yellowstone while in college, and he helped Taffa find a similar position. She managed to graduate with the rest of her class, and the next morning, the family loaded up for the drive to Montana. Taffa would spend the next two years traveling and learning about Indigenous cultures all over the world, after which she would return to Yuma “strong, straightened out, and ready to help” (285).

After spending some time back on the reservation in her twenties, life “spirited [Taffa] away” again, so writing Whiskey Tender was an opportunity to “[reconnect] with [her] homeland” and herself (287). Grandma Esther used to recite the names of places that were important to her, keeping them close even when she could no longer visit them. Taffa notes that “[g]eography is a shaping force that develops our sense of identity and morality” and “that recitation, poetry, and writing are almost always born of nostalgia” (288). She wrote her memoir mostly in the Midwest, recalling the landscape of her childhood with a sense of nostalgia and reminding herself that “the land remembers [her] name” (289), even if it feels far away. Although customs and traditions might change, she reminds herself and her young Indigenous students that “your ancestors are keeping track of you” (289).