When you grow up native and are criticized for not being “native enough”

In the first chapter of his first memoir, “Whiskey Tender,” Deborah Jackson Taffa declares that the story she is about to tell is “common as trash.” This is not an insult or a minimization, but quite the opposite. In a culture that venerates the earth and everything that springs from it, that nourishes it and is nourished by it, the earth is sacred.

Taffa does want to say, however, that he doesn't think his story is unusual because thousands “of Native Americans in California, Arizona and New Mexico could tell it.” This realization came to him much later in life, after traveling and learning that a quarter of the world is indigenous. In her childhood and adolescence, she often felt isolated as an indigenous person, and the book follows her growing understanding of her identities and cultures and the way in which she was imbued with a shame that she did not. It was up to him to carry.

Born to a Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo father and a Catholic Latina mother who never spoke of being descended from both the Spanish conquistadors and the native peoples, Taffa grew up mixing ways of seeing and approaching the world.

“Despondency hung over [Yuma] reserve, and when toddlers and children acted rebellious, adults saw hope and excitement. A daring girl was a girl who could do it,” she writes. Like many other parents, hers changed their minds about her rebellion when she was a teenager. But the fact that her courage and curiosity were encouraged from childhood meant that she was able to recognize that things were more complicated for her family than they were willing to admit.

Their parents' attitudes toward things diverged dramatically, as did their temperaments. His father seemed raw to the world, his memories and traumas always just beneath the surface of his skin, spilling out in stories and outbursts alike; Her mother anchored herself in prayer, preferring to keep her pains private, her doubts buried, and her insecurities hidden behind a competent and confident façade. However, they were united in their commitment to the family they had built and raised together.

Taffa's memoirs are chronological, beginning when she is 3 years old and ending when she is 18. They follow her family's life in Yuma, Arizona, and their subsequent move to Farmington, New Mexico, for her father's job. Throughout, she weaves the historical context of Native history, describing the atrocities that the United States government inflicted on Native Americans, as well as the various tactics that indigenous people have long used to fight back. But she doesn't shy away from complexities; In one chapter, for example, he explores the reasons why members of his family enlisted in the military during World War II: “Their generation had something to prove, and across America, natives lined up at offices recruiting teams ready to fight against the totalitarian idea of ​​a nation. super race, even though they would serve a country that treated them as 'minors' at home.”

Over the years, Taffa experiences racism from whites and also criticism for not being “native enough.” He watches as his mother tries to approach whiteness and encourage it in her children. She sees the ways her father and her siblings live with traumas that they struggle to talk about directly and how some turn to alcohol to numb her pain.

As Taffa approaches adulthood, his own anger at the injustices his people have suffered grows within him. She becomes depressed, loses the ability to concentrate in school like she used to, and begins drinking and staying out late with her classmates, as well as sneaking out of the house to get high and walk early in the morning. She stops believing her parents' insistence that her formal education will provide her with the freedoms and life she wants to lead.

Crucially for a memoirist, Taffa allows his adult perspective to influence his approach to his memories and resists explaining away his youthful anger or denying its validity. There was a lot to be angry about then; There is still a lot to be angry about.

But Taffa begins to realize that change is not only inevitable, but also sacred in itself. The traditions of his Quechan ancestors eschewed materiality, as exemplified in their funeral rituals, which involve burning the deceased person's belongings and once extended to burning that person's house. Taffa's Aunt Vi tells him the story of a ceremony that was abandoned in the 1950s because one of the families participating in it had lost three of its members in one year, leaving no one alive in that family who knew. perform the ritual. “The world was constantly changing,” Taffa writes, “too sacred to be bound, and the elders said that this change was part of the ceremony underway in the world. Aunt Vi said it was a reminder that even the ceremony was material. There was only true power and resilience in nature.”

Now director of the Creative Writing MFA Program at the Santa Fe Institute of American Indian Arts, Taffa has clearly come a long way in her ability to embrace change and synthesize the various elements of her identity. At the end of his memoir, he gives a brief description of how this happened (working in Yellowstone National Park, traveling to Hog Island, then Alaska, Indonesia, and several West African countries), and I longed for him to explain what he learned. I can only hope that this is the project for a future book, which I can only assume will be as rich and wise as “Whisky Tender.”

Ilana Masad is a book and cultural critic and author of “All My Mother's Lovers.”