Whiskey Tender

After Joan left for boarding school, Lorraine got pregnant again, giving birth to a new baby girl named Theresa, and Lori began spending all her time with a group of white girls from her varsity softball team. Edmond worked long hours, and Monica and Taffa were lonely. That summer, they headed to Yuma for the annual intertribal powwow. Taffa was eager for the opportunity to reconnect with her roots.

At the powwow, Taffa ran into her cousin Bobby and jumped at the opportunity to spend time with her “badass older cousin” (167). Bobby’s room was decorated with posters of Indigenous power figures, like Dennis Banks, who Taffa didn’t recognize. He told her how relocation programs had spawned Urban Indian Centers, which allowed Indigenous people from various tribes to connect and start the intertribal Red Power movement. The American Indian Chicago Conference that took place in 1961 was the first big intertribal gathering of Indigenous Americans and the start of the Red Power movement. The National Congress of the American Indian had been working within the system for Indigenous rights for years, but a younger group that spoke at the conference, called the Indian Youth Council, called for more violent action inspired by groups like the Black Panthers. The Council inspired a “shift from patriotism to nationalistic pride with the adoption of more militant tactics” in Indigenous American communities, but Bobby lamented that the Red Power movement was “crushed” by “a bunch of BIA goons” (169).

Back at the powwow, Taffa was surrounded by “[t]he cultural reverberations of the Indian Relocation Act” as members of various tribes participated in one another’s traditions (170). In Farmington, Taffa was “a minority Indian in Navajo country” (171). Navajo people saw the pan-Indian movement as a form of “cultural homogenization,” making the movement unavailable to Taffa. The next day, Taffa watched the powwow and was overcome with nostalgia, missing her life on the reservation and longing for “a deeper sense of belonging and more knowledge about [her] history” (172). She danced to the beat of the drums as if she “was a puppet on an ancestor’s string” (172), and she saw her father smiling as he watched her.

On their last day in Yuma, Lori accidentally slammed Monica’s thumb in the van’s door, sending her to the hospital on Indian Hill for stitches. While they waited for her, they entered a museum that was rarely open. Reading placards, Taffa learned that her ancestors were fiercely protective of their delta farmland. The Quechan people controlled the Yuma Crossing, a tight bend in the Colorado River that was the only safe place to cross for miles before the river was dammed. When gold seekers began to arrive, Quechan men helped them cross, but soon, their numbers ballooned out of control. They trampled the Quechan’s crops, threatening the tribe with starvation. Violence broke out, and the US government was forced to send troops to “keep the peace.” As they left the museum, Edmond told his daughters about the so-called Yuma massacre in 1781, when the Quechan people revolted against colonization and conversion to Christianity by murdering Spanish settlers and burning the church to the ground. He told his daughters not to forget that their ancestors were “[f]earless people who beat their enemies to death before giving in” (175). Taffa felt “embarrassed” to ask her father more. She felt like she “only marginally belonged” on the reservation, while it was her father’s “world” (175).

Not long after they returned to Farmington, Uncle Gene passed away. Doctors had warned him that his liver was failing, but he refused to stop drinking. Taffa was devastated to learn that only her father was going home for the funeral. She felt that she was being cheated out “of a formative experience, time with the family, a chance to practice [her] tribal traditions” (177). Once Edmond returned and recovered, he invited Taffa to ask questions and offered to tell her the Quechan origin story. He told her that “he’d never met a kid who wanted to connect to their tribal roots as much as [she did]” (179).

Taffa was 13 years old and attending Farmington’s public junior high school when she had a disagreement with a girl called Juanita. They arranged a time to fight off of school grounds, but instead of waiting for the appointed time, Juanita attacked Taffa from behind one day at school, getting her suspended for fighting. Edmond insisted that Juanita assaulted Taffa and made her talk to the police. He also visited the school’s vice principal, Mr. Flynn, to reverse her suspension. Taffa worried that Mr. Flynn would think that Edmond was “a restless Native” causing trouble. However, back in Mr. Flynn’s office, Taffa became angry as she listened to the vice principal lecture her father on teaching his children “civility,” claiming that Edmond was being “disrespectful and rude” by “pressuring” him into giving Taffa “special treatment” (184). Mr. Flynn didn’t ask Taffa about the details of the altercation and was surprised when Edmond presented him with a police report detailing the assault. He had no choice but to revoke her suspension.

Taffa headed toward her biology class. However, her teacher announced that Indigenous students could opt out of the lab because “killing insects and dissecting frogs and fetal pigs infringes on Native beliefs” (185). Some of the other kids laughed, but about a third of the class’s Indigenous students decided to opt out. Taffa “froze up.” She remained in the lab group by default. She worked hard on her bug board, collecting and killing insects, and dissected her fetal pig “with a feeling of terror and wonder” (186). She worried that the other Indigenous students were judging her. Her older sisters laughed at her concerns. They were focused on having “a mainstream life” and didn’t share Taffa’s desire to maintain a connection to traditional ways (186).

A few weeks after their fight, Juanita and Taffa made up, and Juanita invited her to Party Cove, a cave situated beneath two bluffs on the outskirts of town. Taffa was still too young to party and had never been to the Cove. She felt out of place with the older kids and climbed up the cliff face, where she found her crush, Rusty, sitting on top of the bluff with some other boys. Rusty remembered that Taffa’s father worked at the power plant, and one of the other boys announced that Edmond Jackson was not well liked at the plant; he acted like he was better than everyone else because he was a foreman. Taffa was upset, running into the dark without a word. Her father “loved” and respected his co-workers and worked hard. Taffa had always been proud of him, but now she was “confused.” Back home, Edmond was waiting for her. Before she could stop herself, Taffa told him what the boy at the party had said, adding that she “was embarrassed that he worked at the plant” (191). Edmond told her about his father losing his arm and going “all poor me,” drinking and leaving Grandma Esther to raise their children on her own. Later, he refused to go to the hospital when he contracted pneumonia. Against his father’s wishes, Edmond loaded him into the car anyway. He wasn’t afraid of his father, and he made his own choices. At the power plant, he became the first Indigenous foreman because he wasn’t afraid to “break tradition.” Many of the Navajo men he worked with refused promotions because tradition demanded that they not “place [themselves] above [their] clan and cousins” (193). His willingness to climb the ranks ruffled some feathers, but he paved the way for other Indigenous men. He told Taffa that she needed to “[h]ave the courage to become an individual” (194). Taffa cried on the porch. She felt like “a half-breed soiled by colonialism” and was afraid of making the wrong choices (194). Even as she promised herself that she “would never go against [her] tribal traditions,” she thought of the “wonder” of seeing the tiny pig’s heart in her biology lab (194).

The year Taffa turned 14, Lorraine’s younger brothers came to stay with the family in Farmington. Many of Taffa’s uncles worked in Yuma and started families of their own, but Lorraine’s five youngest brothers were “the lost and struggling ones” (196). They showed up in Farmington when “they’d screwed up in Yuma,” and Taffa’s parents sent them on their way once “they’d failed in Farmington too” (197), usually by bringing drugs home. Their failures made Taffa sad, and she worried that she might have inherited the same difficulty in succeeding. She was struggling in school, and adults calling her “talented” seemed far away.

In the summer of 1983, Joan graduated high school. She wanted to go to college in Malibu, California, but Lorraine had another new baby, and she and Edmond wanted Joan to stay closer to home. Shortly after Joan’s graduation, Lorraine’s brother Tommy went missing. He turned up a few days later at the Yuma hospital but was completely changed. He had hitched a ride with some guys at the bus stop. They seemingly gave him drugs and then robbed him and dropped him off in the middle of the desert. It was over 100˚F, and Tommy walked for hours before he found help. By the time a pastor and his wife found him and took him to the hospital, Tommy was “catatonic.” He was like “a shell,” barely speaking and moving “like a robot” (200). The Jacksons made the drive to Yuma to see him. They all spent time with Tommy and talked to him, reminding him of happy family memories, but he was unreachable.

Back home, Lorraine and Edmond were visibly affected by what happened to Tommy. Lorraine was praying daily, and Edmond told Taffa that a Navajo friend at work suggested that Tommy had “entered the realm of the medicine man” (202). Ever since the powwow, Taffa had shown more interest in learning about their Indigenous beliefs; this interest seemed to be rekindling Edmond’s own connection to his culture. She was glad to see him “turning toward tribal beliefs to lessen suffering” in the face of Tommy’s tragedy (203). The Navajo friend invited them to attend the Native American Church, a pan-Indian establishment where they took peyote as a sacrament. Taffa was eager to participate, but her mother forbade it, insisting that “[a]ttending a non-Catholic church was a sin” (204). She refused to compromise, and Taffa berated her for “[pretending] to be white” and denying “the beauty of [their] culture” (206). By the time her father interceded, Lorraine was in tears. Taffa understood that her mother “was terrified of complexity” and that her denial of Indigenous beliefs was an attempt to simplify and “control the enormity of life” (205, 207), but Taffa resented it.

As autumn progressed, Taffa felt “suffocated and estranged” in her family home (207). She “wanted more than the Western world could offer” and longed for a deeper connection to the natural world and her Indigenous heritage (208).

Josie was a “wild Apache girl” who Taffa met in seventh grade (209). Taffa felt “drawn” to Josie, admiring her “irreverence” and refusal to conform. Josie, however, only saw Taffa’s “half-breed body” and thought her adherence to “mainstream” white culture made her “a traitor by friendship and blood” (210).

When Taffa started public school, she had “to negotiate the racial tension between townies and reservation folk” (211). She no longer had her father or older sisters standing by, and she began to doubt “what [she’d] been trained to believe, that hard work would make race invisible” (211). New Mexico’s public schools failed to include any of the “state’s complex history” (211). Taffa felt the urge “to distinguish [her]self” and “overturn the backward impression people had of [Indigenous people]” (212).

Early in the school year, she was invited to celebrate the popular Ariel’s 14th birthday in a single-wide trailer out in the country. Driving over with Ariel’s mother and the other girls, Taffa asked about Josie, who was also friends with Ariel. Ariel told her that Josie hadn’t been invited because her dog was “trained […] to attack Indians” (214). The girls giggled as they told Taffa that they felt “so bad about it” (214). Taffa spent the rest of the drive terrified that the dog would sense her blood. However, returning from the party the next day, she was overcome with guilt and embarrassment that she had “passed” as white, “even temporarily.”

As the school year passed, the idea of “passing” made Taffa more uncomfortable. People often assumed that she was Hispanic, and others, like her mother, didn’t understand why Taffa would “want to deal with discrimination if [she] didn’t have to” (216). By freshman year, Josie had become a drug dealer, and when she showed up at a party to sell marijuana, she insulted Taffa loudly, calling her a “white bitch.” Taffa wanted her to know that she, too, faced discrimination because of her Indigenous heritage, but they were interrupted by a boy named Craig, who recently moved to Farmington from Colorado.

Craig was interested in Taffa, and she agreed to date him. It didn’t occur to her at first that he didn’t realize she was Indigenous, but as their relationship progressed, “social pressures” started mounting. Craig and his friends joked, for example, about “rolling drunk Indians” in downtown Farmington, and one of his friends told Taffa that she was “too pretty to be Indian” (221). She often felt a “chronic and debilitating” loneliness at school (220), and she felt like Josie might be the only one to understand what she was going through. She tried to break up with Craig several times, but she also liked how “people respected [her]” when she was with him. However, she hated how “he sought to forget, deny, or stop [her] from being Native” (221).

Taffa felt a strong urge to embrace her Indigenous heritage, though she knew it would lead to greater discrimination. She began telling Craig more about her tribe and started wearing moccasins to school. One afternoon, Taffa was sitting outside with Craig when the coach of the baseball team teased him about getting his “Navajo under a tree” (223). Craig blushed sharply, but Taffa tried to correct the coach, telling him that she wasn’t Navajo. The coach showed no interest, and Taffa stormed off. As she left, Craig asked her not to wear her “stupid moccasins.” She refused, and they broke up.

Driving through downtown Farmington one afternoon, Taffa and her mother saw a group of police officers “manhandling” some Indigenous women. Taffa shouted to her mother to stop, but she refused. Lorraine insisted that she needed to “worry about [her]self” and not “make excuses” for others who “weren’t trying” (225). When Taffa spent time at the library, her parents believed that she was doing homework, but she was conducting research on her tribe and family. For the first time, “[t]he magnitude of [her] family’s loss was beginning to dawn on [her]” (226).

Through her research, Taffa learned more about Sarah Winnemucca, her ancestor who went by the stage name “Indian Princess.” Sarah’s father was a medicine man who didn’t trust white men when they arrived, but her grandfather was a tribal leader who helped the newly arrived white men map the region. Therefore, Sarah grew up constantly “hearing two opposing views” (226). When she was 13, she moved in with a white man and his family, where she learned to read, write, and speak English and Spanish. At 16, she enrolled in a convent school. It was the mid-1800s, and tensions were rising between Indigenous people and white settlers. When Sarah returned to her tribe, she took advantage of her “multilingual skills” to encourage “compromise, […] believing the best route was assimilation and peace” (228). By the 1880s, Sarah was traveling the county and giving talks to white audiences to raise awareness of Indigenous struggles. She was working for a good cause, but her “performances,” which often featured “fake Indian costumes” and “reenacted the myth of Pocahontas,” perpetuated “harmful myths about Native women” (228). She supported the 1887 Dawes Act, which further stripped Indigenous communities of their remaining land, and grew depressed as she was criticized by Indigenous and white Americans.

Sarah died of tuberculosis at 47, still outliving the average life expectancy for Indigenous people. Taffa wonders how this tendency to die so young affected how history was passed down. She wonders if her ancestors might have shared more if they had lived longer or “if they hadn’t been silenced by the trauma of poverty and Indian boarding schools” (229).

One morning, Aunt Vi called with the news that Taffa’s great-grandmother Ethel died. Taffa was surprised to learn that the funeral ceremony would include burning Granny Ethel’s house with all her possessions inside. The government had outlawed burning the houses of the deceased, but because Ethel was the reservation’s oldest resident, she received an exception. The Jacksons couldn’t go to the reservation for the funeral, but they felt the somberness of the occasion. Lori and Joan came home so that the family could be together, and they spent the day of the funeral playing Monopoly. Taffa had been pestering her father with questions about Ethel and their family history. She was embarrassed to learn that the family name used to be Sackhavaum. They were given the name Jackson when Taffa’s great-great-grandfather refused to sign his land over to the US government. Edmond brought out a family photo album and showed Taffa and her sisters a photo of him dressed up in regalia that Ethel made. When the girls asked why he “looked so miserable” (235), he told them that the Lakota kids used to make fun of them because the elaborate feather headdresses were appropriated from Plains Indians.

One day, Taffa was driving home when she noticed one of the girls whom she had seen being harassed by police officers a few months previous. The girl and her friend were hitchhiking, so Taffa picked them up. The girl’s name was Betty Turtle, and Taffa offered to take her all the way to her destination, even though it was out of her way. As they talked, Betty told Taffa about her uncle, a medicine man who “enjoyed reconnecting lost kids to their culture” (238). She took Taffa’s phone number to put them in touch.