Whiskey Tender

When Taffa was young, her family moved from the Yuma reservation in California to Farmington, New Mexico. Leaving the reservation was often considered “a betrayal,” but Taffa’s father, Edmond Jackson, chose to pursue his career, and he and Taffa’s mother, Lorraine Lopez Herrera, raised their children as “mainstream Americans.” Taffa’s childhood was often full of “challenges, fears, and feelings of inadequacy” (6), but she romanticizes happy childhood memories like playing in the river with her family. She insists that her story is “common.” However, Indigenous memoirs are unusual because “[t]alking to outsiders is taboo” (7). Taffa wants to share her story to better understand herself, reclaim Indigenous peoples’ ability to tell their own stories, and help Indigenous children feel less alone.

Even though “America runs like a river through [Taffa’s] veins,” she never saw anyone like her, “a mixed-tribe Native girl” (8), represented in media. She avoided writing about the “atrocities” that her ancestors experienced, worried that she was bragging about having “super genes” because her ancestors survived so much (8). Now, she recognizes that her “hesitation was shame” (8). She will no longer “participate in the erasure of [her] own people” (9).

Growing up on the Yuma reservation in the 1970s, Taffa and her three sisters roughhoused. They were always ending up in the Yuma Indian Hospital with one injury or another. However, this spunk was often celebrated by adults, who saw their rebellion as a sign of “hope and verve” (10).

Taffa’s Yuma ancestors lived near the Colorado River; yearly floods made the land fertile. However, by the time Taffa was born in 1969, her ancestors’ land had been divided following the Dawes Act and the damming of the Colorado River. The land that had once been “an oasis” was dry and barren. The members of her father’s family each received 10 acres of land and built three houses. The bank wouldn’t accept reservation land as collateral for loans for building materials, so much of Taffa’s family continued to rent elsewhere.

As a young girl, Taffa began to sense that her father “had a secret” (14). He had nightmares and got angry at “leathery men in gallon hats” (14). He seemed to “shrink” when they went into town, and sometimes, Taffa could “feel the weight of his wounding, as well as the difficulty of [her] knowledge that not everything was getting told” (16).

The family loved the drive-in theater, and they often ran into family there. One night, they saw Taffa’s uncle Gene, Edmond’s older brother and the “undisputed [family] badass.” Taffa didn’t understand the complex relationship between her father and uncle. Uncle Gene raised Edmond and his brothers while their father went through his “alcoholic years” in the 1950s. Edmond’s grandmother was Shoshone Paiute, and his mother was Laguna Pueblo. They didn’t learn to speak the Yuma language growing up and struggled to fit in on the reservation. Gene fought “to prove his power and strength” and demanded that his younger brothers do the same (18).

After coming home from the drive-in, Edmond had a nightmare. He stumbled out of his bedroom, and Taffa heard him say, “I killed a man” (19). Later, Taffa learned the whole story. When Edmond was 16, he went to pick up Uncle Gene. On the way, they saw a friend getting arrested. Gene swore at the police, and they chased the boys as Edmond raced back toward the reservation, where the county police lost their jurisdiction. Just before they crossed over, Edmond lost control of the car. The vehicle slid into the river, and the boys piled out and ran. Edmond remembered one of his close friends who was drunk in the car. His friend drowned, and Edmond was arrested for manslaughter. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Edmond’s arrest was made possible by the Major Crimes Act, passed in 1885, which gave the US government the ability to prosecute Indigenous people for serious crimes committed on Indigenous land, “stripping Indigenous communities of traditional methods of justice” (21-22). The Major Crimes Act was another step on the path to “forced cultural assimilation” that continued the act of the 1871 Indian Appropriations Act, which stripped tribes of their identity as “independent nations” and allowed the US government to seize valuable land (22). In 1953, the Major Crimes Act was followed by Public Law 280, which transferred some crimes from federal to state jurisdiction.

Edmond got in trouble again and was sent back to prison, losing his chance to finish high school. After a fight, he was put in solitary confinement and promised himself that he would never “do this shit again” (25). Taffa describes her father’s night terrors as “the final throes of the long spiritual crisis [Edmond] and many Native men go through to defeat their anger and create an identity they can live with in peace” (26).

Growing up, Taffa “craved” a “dream reality” in which “the desert was an oasis of peace” (27), not a place where traditional ways of life were lost and men “disappeared into drinking and violence” or “long work hours and silence” (26).

Taffa turned four in 1973. Her family lived in an apartment in Yuma and were largely “nocturnal” because of the stifling heat. Late at night, Taffa’s mother would play her Temptations album and teach her daughters how to do the twist. Whenever Lorraine was in a good mood, the Jackson girls took advantage of it, begging for a story, like the story of their parents’ wedding. After the reception, Edmond, who had been drinking, sped his bride away. Frightened, Lorraine reached her leg across his lap to step on the break, and the car crashed into the side of a downtown bar. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the day drinkers spilled out, recognizing Edmond and Lorraine. At the sight of Lorraine on the curb in her wedding dress, the police let Edmond go. Lorraine believed that they felt sorry for her, but Edmond claimed that they let them go because Lorraine was so beautiful. 

Edmond and Lorraine met in 1962. Lorraine had dropped out of high school to get a job, hoping to escape caring for her 14 younger siblings sooner. Her life was “incredibly small,” consisting of “mass, school, and a bedroom shared with toddlers” (31). Edmond seemed “worldly” to her, and he was taken by her “porcelain beauty.” As their courtship was beginning, the civil rights movement gained traction, and the couple endured angry remarks from white men who didn’t think that the pale Lorraine “fit” with the dark-skinned Edmond. However, they both grew up in large families with parents who insisted that they speak English. They understood poverty, “[t]heir fathers were sometimes negligent” (31), and they both had family from New Mexico.

In 1598, a silver baron from Mexico called Juan de Oñate arrived in present-day Socorro, New Mexico, with a group of colonists and priests. They nearly died in the desert but were saved by a group of Piro Indians. To show their gratitude, they named the first established mission Our Lady of Perpetual Help and then “decimate[d] the Piro Indians” (32). Oñate built a silver mine in Socorro and enslaved Acoma Pueblo children, ushering in “[a]n era of rampant slavery” that would last for nearly 200 years (32). A population known as genízaros emerged—enslaved Indigenous people who spoke Spanish, took Spanish surnames, and had “Spanish” children. When enslaved Indigenous people were freed 13 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the genízaros settled outside Spanish communities and set about “[forgetting] their cultural losses” and ignoring their Indigenous roots (33). Many Hispanic people in the region, including Lorraine’s family, considered “themselves […] sangre pura Spanish” (33), but Lorraine’s features belied her Indigenous heritage. She never confessed her family’s genízaro history, and Taffa thinks it’s possible that she didn’t know about it. Unlike Edmond, who “never lived a day when he wasn’t cracking open” and sharing his secrets, Lorraine “held her silence for a lifetime” (35).

Shortly after their wedding, Lorraine and Edmond moved to Phoenix, where Edmond attended welding school. The program was part of the Indian Relocation Act, which aimed to “disappear Natives into mainstream America” (37). Indigenous people were given scholarships to trade schools with the hope that “[r]elocation would encourage intermarriage with non-Natives” (37). After Edmond finished school, the “fancy” job he was promised didn’t appear, so he and Lorraine moved back to Yuma. Soon after, their first child, Joan, was born. Another daughter, called Lorraine, or “Lori,” followed her. Their third child was a boy who died in infancy. Taffa came next, followed by Monica 13 months later.

By the fall of 1973, Lorraine was frustrated with Edmond’s “long work hours and multiple jobs” (39-40). A welding position hadn’t materialized, and Lorraine urged her husband to look for work in other towns. Edmond and other Indigenous men in his generation saw “poverty [as] an expression of Indianness itself” (44), and he was reluctant to leave Yuma. Lorraine became more depressed and started locking herself in her room, where she would watch The Price Is Right for hours. Edmond’s “ancestral loss” was “sprinkled […] with nostalgia,” but Lorraine’s became “a desire for more” (44). She continued pushing her husband.

In the fall of 1974, Lorraine received a phone call: Edmond hadn’t shown up for his afternoon shift at the gas station. Lorraine made calls, but no one had seen him. They spent the day driving around the reservation, checking his “old haunts.” The next morning, Edmond still hadn’t appeared. On the third day of his disappearance, Lorraine went to look at a body that was found in the river, and Aunt Vi distracted Taffa and her sisters. She was halfway through a story when Edmond walked through the door.

Parking at the morgue, Lorraine saw her husband marching across to the courthouse with a line of other prisoners. He had been finishing his shift when Lorraine’s teenage brother Andy asked to borrow his truck. Andy returned the truck, nursing a bottle of whiskey, right before Edmond’s next shift started. Edmond was driving them both to his job at the gas station when the police pulled him over. When the officer learned that Andy was only 18, he accused Edmond of buying him alcohol. Edmond, who had been branded a “criminal” his whole life, knew better than to talk back.

Edmond was taken to the police station, where his call to Lorraine wouldn’t go through. Lorraine was furious with her husband, her brother, and the officer who arrested him. She complained that they were “never going to get out of this dump” (58). Edmond called his boss, who told him that he could come to work right away if he wanted. He left.

Edmond agreed to look outside of Yuma for a better-paying welding job, but his job hunt was interrupted by his mother’s cancer diagnosis in 1975. Edmond insisted that he couldn’t “abandon” his mother, even as Grandma Esther demanded that he not “waste away on the reservation” (60). Esther’s Laguna people were “proactive about leaving home for employment” and established communities across the Southwest (60). Esther believed that reservations and tribal governments would eventually be disassembled and that Indigenous people needed to be prepared. She urged all her children to take advantage of the Relocation Program’s job training, even though many of them returned home to the reservation afterward. Edmond was desperate to stay home and convince his mother to undergo treatment for her cancer, which she refused, believing that dying was a way of “honoring […] new lives waiting to be born” (61-62).

Grandma Esther came from a region in New Mexico where 60% of US uranium was mined. There were large open-pit uranium mines miles from her home village, and Esther saw an atomic bomb test in 1945. No one mentioned these factors when she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in her sinus cavity.

Grandma Esther met Grandpa Ed when they were students at an Indian boarding school in Phoenix. They married and moved to the Laguna Colony in Winslow, Arizona, where Ed worked on the railroad. Esther was pregnant with Edmond when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the stress caused premature labor. Across the country, Indigenous men were eager to enlist, and the Laguna men began beating war drums and putting on war paint. They saw World War II as a fight “for the very freedoms they had been hoping to attain for many generations” (63). Ed wanted to go to war, but Esther convinced him that his place was at home with his wife and children. He had a well-paying job, unlike many of the other Indigenous men who were enlisting. Ed agreed, but the decision made him “feel like a coward” (65). Surrounded by stories of bravery in battle, Ed grew depressed, started drinking, and left his railroad job to move back to the reservation.

On the reservation, poverty was rampant, and as “the fantasy of governmental support” dwindled (67), Ed and others often turned to alcohol. One day, Ed and a friend were drinking and driving across a bridge on the reservation when the friend sideswiped a truck. Ed’s arm was on the car’s windowsill, and the impact cut off his elbow. The injury deepened Ed’s depression and worsened his drinking. He got angry when he drank, fighting and waking up his children. After he hit Esther, she packed up the kids and took them back to New Mexico. Early in the morning on July 16, 1945, a loud blast rattled the windows in Laguna. The people gathered outside to see what had happened; Esther unknowingly brushed radioactive ash from her clothes. It rained, but the people continued to collect and use the water as usual.

By Christmas 1975, Grandma Esther was too sick to celebrate. She had begun to have icama, fever dreams that formed a central part of Quechan culture, of her husband, who died years before. By February, she had to wear bandages on her face, but she refused treatment, including for pain management. Father Paul, the local priest, gave Esther Communion and heard her confession. She “loved the rituals of the mass” but had decided to go ahead with a Quechan funeral (73), though the church discouraged the practice. These contradictions confused some of Taffa’s aunts. Aunt Vi realized that Esther maintained “a deep appreciation for the old ways” and insisted that “[i]t was her business how she went about living and dying” (74).

Grandma Esther passed away in April. In her last days, she spoke Keres, the Indigenous language of her childhood. She talked about Shipap, “a world of white” that was tended by Iyatiku, the Corn Mother, who used to live among humans but left for Shipap after “troublemakers” brought on a famine (75). This helped Taffa understand that her grandmother also wanted “to climb away from the troublemakers” and leave behind the violence that haunted her on Earth (76). Taffa and her family said their goodbyes, and Edmond took her and her sisters outside, where he explained that they had roots like trees that stretched from Esther’s life into their own. However, her death represented a huge blow to their family’s traditional knowledge. She was “a holder of wisdom” (77), the last Keres speaker in the family, and that knowledge died with her.

In March 1976, Edmond finally found a welding job on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. He was ecstatic, but the power plant wanted him to start immediately. Edmond found a coworker willing to let him sleep on his couch, so he took a bus alone to Farmington while the children finished the school year in Yuma. Three weeks later, the whole family moved to New Mexico.

In 1948, a catastrophic blizzard hit Navajo and Hopi lands as President Truman tried to pass the Marshall Plan, a foreign aid program meant to gain allies in the Cold War. Indigenous people were frustrated that this aid was going abroad instead of supporting the Indigenous population’s veterans. The Truman administration sent food into the reservations, passing the Navajo Hopi Rehabilitation Act the following year to support infrastructure development. Some politicians argued that reducing Indigenous populations was a better strategy because their existence was too costly. Indigenous activists argued that tribal lands needed “money for scientific, technical, medical, and industrial progress” (83), but Congress invested in relocation programs. Most of the Indigenous people who participated in the Indian Relocation Act moved to big cities, but the Jacksons found themselves in Farmington.

Joan and Lori were enrolled in Sacred Heart Catholic School and complained about the strictness of the nuns and the unfriendliness of their classmates. Taffa would begin at the start of the next school year. She was disappointed to be left out but also frightened by her sisters’ stories. She grew homesick for Yuma. The Jacksons “were nobody” in Farmington; the abundance of family in Yuma was gone.

To prepare for the new school year, Taffa memorized every US state and president. She especially liked Andrew Jackson; Indigenous families were once named after presidents by the government, and Taffa looked forward to sharing this in school. One afternoon, she found her father watching a baseball game. A pair of long-haired men ran onto the field with an American flag. The announcer described two “animals” on the field, confusing Taffa, who watched as the men poured kerosene on the flag and hurried to strike a match. Edmond told his daughter that they were protesting the United States bicentennial celebration as one of the baseball players snatched the flag away before the men could light it on fire. The crowd cheered, but Taffa was “embarrassed to ask if anyone else noticed that the man and his son looked like [her] family” (87).

Even in childhood, “there were hints that [Taffa’s family’s] political relationship with the United States was complicated” (88). Her father praised Mohammed Ali, for example, and “cackled derisively” when John Wayne was on television. Her mother, meanwhile, was “perpetually shushing him, so [the] kids wouldn’t grow up jaded” (89). That summer of 1976, Edmond bought a copy of Richard Pryor’s new album. Taffa heard her father chuckling as he listened later. She “didn’t know what Black history had to do with [her family]” (88), but as she listened in on Pryor’s skits, she started “intuiting something.” The emotions were complicated and confusing, but she sensed that Edmond “might not be proud of [her]” if he knew how she’d “been fawning over [] Jackson’s picture” (89).

That summer, Edmond tried to dissipate the family’s homesickness, busying them with softball and outings around town. However, Taffa suspected that he missed Yuma and noticed him “trying to re-create the reservation in small yet obvious ways” (91). One afternoon, the family saw a Navajo couple arguing in a parking lot. The man punched the woman in the face, knocking her down, before hurrying into his truck. As he backed out, the woman wrapped her arms around herself and rolled under the tires. Edmond pulled out quickly as they heard sirens coming. That night, Lori and Joan argued over whether or not the man had looked like their father. Taffa felt naked without “[t]he cocoon of safety” that her extended family provided in Yuma and got out of bed to find her parents on the couch (92). When she asked, Edmond explained that they had to leave Yuma “to find a better life” (93). In leaving, Taffa lost her “perspective” and “sense of both past and future” (93). She had no one to explain that Jackson was nicknamed the “Indian Killer” and had no idea that the United States bicentennial celebration was “both an omission and a snub” because the land had been inhabited for thousands of years (94). This lack of understanding “ensured that […] [she] would have to live with the insult of how vague [her] self-awareness was, and how stupidly it allowed [her] to behave” (94).