WHISKEY TENDER

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.