When one grows up Native and faulted for not being 'Native enough'

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Deborah Jackson Taffa's memoir 'Whiskey Tender' explores complexities of her family history and her own life as the child of a Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo father and a Catholic Latina.

In the first chapter of her debut memoir, “Whiskey Tender,” Deborah Jackson Taffa declares that the story she’s about to tell is “common as dirt.” This isn’t an insult or a minimization — quite the opposite. In a culture that reveres the land and all that springs from it, that nourishes and is nourished by it, the earth is sacred. Taffa does mean, however, that she doesn’t believe her story to be unusual because thousands “of Native Americans in California, Arizona, and New Mexico could tell it.

But she doesn’t shy away from complexities; in one chapter, for example, she explores reasons her family members enlisted in the military during World War II: “Their generation had something to prove, and across America, Natives stood in line at draft offices ready to fight against the totalitarian idea of a super race, even though they would serve for a country that treated them as ‘lesser’ at home.

 

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