When Deborah Jackson Taffa was offered a job at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, she wasn’t even sure if she would be able to come back to New Mexico.
Growing up in 1980s Farmington had been difficult for Taffa, the daughter of a Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo father and a mother whose Hispanic family did not acknowledge its Indigenous ancestry. After a rocky adolescence spent trying to come to terms with her heritage, Taffa left New Mexico the day after she graduated high school and never looked back — at least, not for a while.
With her new memoir Whiskey Tender, Taffa is attempting to fill the gaps in the canon of Indigenous writing.
“There was no Native memoir written about a kid growing up in the late ’70s and ’80s out in the world,” Taffa says. “A lot of Native memoirs are sort of ‘slice of life’ stories that are directly related to a specific form of trauma, and that’s not what I wanted to create.”
Taffa describes her book as an attempt to illustrate what it was like to grow up balancing the concept of the American dream against “the realities of being a Native kid in a small town.”
“It’s a cliché, but it’s like what Toni Morrison said, I wrote the book that I couldn’t find on the shelf,” she says.
Author Deborah Jackson Taffa
Taffa’s memoir documents her childhood, starting as a baby on the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation and ending as a high school graduate in Farmington. In Farmington Taffa often felt like an outsider both from Hispanic and Anglo New Mexicans as well as the large Diné (Navajo) population, who seemed to have more understanding of their own culture. Taffa’s own family often avoided talking about their past, in part due to painful memories and in part with the hope that assimilation would make their lives easier and safer. But that aspiration often left Taffa feeling adrift, with consequences that could have been dire.
Taffa says the book was formed not out of a desire to create a work of literary nonfiction but from “a lot of internal pressure to understand my own life.”
While the memoir is focused on Taffa’s youth, she goes back in time throughout the book to tell stories about her parents’ upbringing and their families as well as the stories of more distant ancestors and how their experiences were shaped by different U.S. policy decisions regarding Native Americans, such as the Dawes Act of 1987 or the Indian boarding school system.
She initially wrestled with whether it would even be appropriate to share her family’s stories in such intimate detail but decided it would be worth it if she could get people to understand more about how Native people have been disenfranchised throughout American history.
“If I could expose hidden histories, if I could teach people about governmental policies that affect Native people across the country, regardless of what tribe they come from, then somehow I felt like I could justify revealing stories about other people,” she says.
Despite the at-times heavy subject matter, the book is easy to access and doesn’t require any specialized knowledge about the American Southwest or Indigenous history. That was by design, Taffa says.
“I didn’t want to write a history text or a nonfiction brick that sits in the library and nobody wants to read it,” she says. “I wanted to be engaging, I wanted to be entertaining, I wanted it to be funny.”
Whiskey Tender is all three of those things, although it also doesn’t pull any punches when diving into heavy subject matter. But while it delves into the hardship that her family struggled through and the conflicts Taffa had with her parents, particularly her mother, during her childhood, a deep love for everyone in her family and her wider Native American community is the animating force of the memoir.
Taffa’s mother died at the beginning of the pandemic. Her father is 83, and while everyone in her family has their own recollections of some of the stories she describes, she says he was inspired by the book. He was the only one of her family members who read it before publication; the others opted to wait, which Taffa says was somewhat nerve-wracking.
“It’s wonderful that people are telling me they enjoy the book, but the people who matter the most ultimately are your family members,” she says.
As a memoirist, Taffa says her contract with the reader is to be as honest and transparent as possible. Writing about the events of her childhood through a distance of many years has been helpful, she says; if she tried to write the same book in her 20s it would have been very difficult.
Now that it’s been “a long time since I’ve left Farmington,” Taffa says she’s been able to process the events in private and turn them into something she can share with the world.
“That’s what writing basically is,” she says. “You take some scene that was relatively ugly and difficult to live but as you shape it on the page, and you use lyric language, and you find imagery that feels beautiful and inventive, you basically spin it into gold,” she says. “It’s a really good feeling.”
Taffa and her husband spent much of their life in the Midwest, including Chicago and Iowa City, where she received her MFA. During the pandemic they spent a year in Hawaii helping one of her daughters raise her newborn baby while her husband was deployed in the Air Force. Living on the island, Taffa became friends with many Native Hawaiians, including her son-in-law’s relatives, and once returning to the mainland realized she needed to be around Native people again.
That’s what led her to Santa Fe, where she’s now the director of the Institute for American Indian Arts’ MFA program in creative writing.
“I think there had probably always been a clock ticking that was going to eventually bring me back west,” she says.
Taffa says the community was incredibly supportive of her during her book launch and that she’s grateful for the opportunity not just to see her own work out in the world but also to help other Indigenous writers break onto the literary scene.
N. Scott Momaday helped launched a renaissance for Native American writers when his House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, leading to a flood of works by Native writers for about a decade. By the 1980s — the period Taffa covers in Whiskey Tender — that had waned, but she says the number of Native writers currently publishing gives her hope that people are “becoming hungrier for Native stories.”
“I think we’re breaking new ground now for everything that’s to come,” she says. “And I feel very, very optimistic that maybe this time, it’s not a renaissance, because renaissance suggests a very lively time for the arts, and then it kind of dies down. I hope it’s just a permanent change.” ◀
