Interview with Deborah Taffa, author of “Whiskey Tender,” by Rey M. Rodriguez

On September 10, 2024, I had the pleasure of interviewing Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender and a finalist for the National Book Award. Tommy Orange called her memoir, “. . . unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told . . .” Taffa is the director of the MFA in Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM. She is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Before accepting her position at IAIA, she taught Creative Nonfiction at Webster University and Washington University in Saint Louis. She also served as an Executive Board Member with the Missouri Humanities Council where she was instrumental in creating a Native American Heritage Program in the state. She has earned numerous awards. In this interview, we discussed a wide range of topics from her memoir to an alternative interpretation of Kokopelli. She also shares with us what she has learned being the director of IAIA.  

Welcome to the Chapter House Storyteller’s Corner where we interview great authors. Can you let us know how you got started in writing?  

I knew from a very young age that I would be a writer. For years, I scribbled, but I was too wounded by my education to pursue publishing or academia. Instead of getting a degree, I opted to travel. I set out at nineteen, went to Indonesia and West Africa. It was healing for me, and everywhere I went I took notes. I saw that colonization had happened on a global scale, which I knew but hadn’t internalized until I’d been around the globe. It made me less precious about my own struggles, and with objective distance the writer is born.  

Now I believe it was good that I waited to publish. There are a thousand ways to approach a story. When I was young, I would have been easier to edit, easier to manipulate, and that’s something I don’t want. I don’t want an editor to help me shape my story, so I did it all backwards. I had children and didn’t get my undergraduate degree until I was 34. I went to Iowa City for my MFA when I was 39.  

People sometimes assume that I came to writing late in life, but I started writing early. I just waited to publish. You only get one debut, and in memoir you must decide on your persona, and what to portray when you have so many nesting dolls inside of you. There were so many threads and themes I wanted to address.  

That's great. How did you begin to thread all your themes together?  

I started with the big moments, the richest memories. In the beginning, I did it wrong. I tried to build scenes with interior thought and reflection woven in. Too often, I would digress. I have a good friend who is almost 80 now and she told me, “Just write one scene, one episode, one time. Don't worry about where it's going to fit in the book, or what the connective tissue is, and so I began to write the non-negotiable moments like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. My Uncle Johnny's funeral, my earliest powwow, an altercation with a teacher, moments that were heightened. I had no idea where they would fit in the book. I gathered them like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to connect them. I aimed to order it, and it fell apart, so I aimed again, and it fell apart again. The book moved from an essay collection organized around different forms of violence (environmental violence, police brutality, domestic violence, political violence, Christian violence), finally, to the memoir it is today.  

Reworking a manuscript over years of writing, some things fall away, and others emerge. My mother died in the final years of revision, for example, and she went from being barely in the book to being a major character. I had always thought of my dad as like the main character, and then suddenly I realized my mother was central to the story. Suddenly her struggle with her Chicana inheritance informed my very Indigenous story. From there, it moved from something intellectual to something more emotional for me personally.  

That's interesting because I share the same thing. My mom passed away in 2016 and my writing process has been working through that grief. She was an artist, and it’s great to be able to express her and to read and bring her to life.  

I had a complicated relationship with my mother. Losing someone with whom you have a loving relationship is tragic, but it’s even harder when the relationship is unresolved. She was a fire-and-brimstone Catholic, adamant about confession. The rules of the church were something that she promoted, and she always made me feel guilty. I don't mind going to church when I'm out at Laguna Pueblo. The Pueblo faith is a fusion of Indigenous belief systems and Catholicism, but that’s not the version my mother promoted in our family. When she died, our conversation wasn’t over, and so that conversation ended up happening on the page.  

That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that emotion. I grew up in Durango, Colorado, so I appreciate your first chapter and your description of Farmington. Because there was all this history in terms of how native people were treated that was never spoken about, and you bring it to life. I'm wondering if you would talk about writing about Farmington, New Mexico, and that experience?  

They called it the Selma, Alabama of the Southwest when I was a kid. A horrific crime happened when I was a little girl (one that I write about in the book), a situation where three high school boys tortured and killed two Navajo men. My parents were worried about our safety. People went missing. Indigenous women were murdered. It was a bad time. Subliminal tension was part of my childhood.  

I was in Iowa City in 2011 before I put pen to paper about it. I was spurred on because there was another horrific crime in Farmington. An Indigenous man was at a McDonald's, and these teenagers took him. They shaped a wire hanger into the form of a swastika, heated it on a stove, and branded him with it. I read a news article about it when I was in my MFA program. I saw that one of the young men who was arrested for the crime was a Chicano. It wasn’t just racist oil-field roughnecks. It was a Chicano guy, an Indigenous guy, which makes it self-injury. It made me sick, and I started writing. The dam to my memory just busted open. I went home, and I wrote this essay called, “On Bison Skulls and Trains.” It won an award with Solstice Magazine, and I think that was the first time I wrote about violence.  

Interestingly, a Black friend with two kids explained a similar experience. He lives in a white community. He told me that as parents they were very strict with their kids. They always explained to me that they had to be for the safety of their kids. They had to teach their children to be respectful of authority, such as the police. They had to be. It’s a unifying theme.  

My parents were strict, and my parents kept secrets to keep us safe. I think they believed little kids needed an archetypal version of the world to feel safe. The police could be good, the firemen could be good. My sisters and I could grow to be the president of the United States. They waited to introduce the horror stories, and we sure as heck didn’t get a full picture of our Catholic school curriculum.  

I think my parents erred in keeping those secrets and trying to make us believe in America as a meritocracy for too long. And I know for my mom it was for different reasons than my dad. I think my dad did it because he'd seen a lot of his brothers who had fallen to this idea of themselves as victims. Instead, my dad wanted us to believe that we could achieve anything: that we could become authors, run a company, be CEOs. He was always advising caution and obedience, but he was also very invested in keeping us innocent for as long as he could. Eventually, as a child, you start to realize that the full version of the story is not being told, and you start to hear things at school, and your parents can't save you from being wounded.  

Can you talk about how difficult it was to make that decision to leave the reservation?  

I think the most difficult aspect of that decision for Indigenous families is a value system based on family. It's not like my parents ever said they were going to go on vacation with their friends. Every single time we had vacation days we went back to the reservation. We visited all the aunts and uncles and cousins, then we would go out to LA to visit my dad's brothers who had moved out there for the Indian Relocation Program. He would take all the cousins with us to Disneyland. The focus was always on family.  

Indigenous people will often say that if you leave your homeland you go through some version of soul death. And now in society, the way that we are forced to go off to college and follow careers that belief can be a stressor. What I have come to prize as I've gotten older is the idea that my indigenous valuables are portable. I can go anywhere and stand on a river, or see a beautiful mountain and feel the earth, and know it's a continuum. I'm not in my homeland, but I can feel the bounty of the earth and the reciprocity of the earth running through my feet, and I take solace in that feeling.  

Of course, now I'm back in Santa Fe. But I have my grandsons who are half native Hawaiian because my daughter married a native Hawaiian, and when I go to Oahu, I spend time with his family. They're different, but they have a similar vein. We're diverse in our languages, our spiritual practices, and our philosophies. But there is a core that is similar, and politically, it's good for us to think of ourselves as relatives in this fight for land and language back. I guess I try to accept the fact that my family has become part of this diaspora. I try to find the good in it rather than simply mourning it because I think it's easy to become frightened when leaving your homeland. My mom and dad certainly struggled with that decision a great deal.  

I appreciate what you are saying. I went to Indonesia, and it was interesting going there and seeing the temples. They reminded me of many of the temples in Mexico. And it felt like there was this connection that hasn't been spoken about and that we need to talk about.  

Yes, similarities and allies are good to remember.  

Yes, what we have in common.  

We have conversations about this at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In our mission statement, for example, we changed the word Native to Indigenous to identify and connect with other tribal people. It strengthens us politically to stand together, not only in politics but also in the arts. It creates richer content to read Indigenous people from other continents. I heard somebody speak about this last night. Kinsale Drake (Navajo) talked about writing a poem that was “after” a Maori poet. She asked, “Am I navigating this topic correctly?” And it becomes a refrain and navigation, but she changed the Polynesian concept of navigating to the Navajo idea of weaving. Cross-pollination is fruitful. I love to see the interplay on a global scale.  

That's thrilling. One of the things we're trying to do at Chapter House is talk about how we lift the philosophies of Indigenous teaching so that it unifies many marginalized communities as well and lifts those voices that we haven't heard and yet have so much to teach us.  

Mexican, Chicano, Latino, Hispanic people in your case.  

Yes.  

We see some native authors now who are doing that because their parentage is mixed. Natalie Diaz is half Mexican. Oscar Hokeah. Me. The Americas are a stronghold of Indigenous vision and power.  

What was it like being shortlisted for the National Book Award? 

It was beautiful, but it would have meant nothing if my Kwatsaan and Laguna relatives hadn’t liked the book. I could have garnered all the critical praise in the world, but the book would have been a failure if my father hadn’t liked it.  

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a poetry book inspired by a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program. This fall, his poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Corner, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review. 

Edmond Jackson, Deborah Jackson Taffa, and her siblings. They are positioned to mirror the picture on the cover of the book, “Whiskey Tender.”