Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This book was our selection this month for the Literary Lush Book Club. As is our usual tradition for November, we read the “One Book One Bakersfield” selection.
The “One Book One Bakersfield” selections have been pretty hit and miss. Not terrible or even close, but a few have been mostly “meh.” Others have been quite excellent, such as last year’s book, All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung, and The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman from 2016.
Whiskey Tender was a good read, and for the first time, my wife and I were able to attend the author’s lecture at CSUB. And that lecture was excellent. Taffa is a compelling speaker, thoughtful and passionate.
The book itself is mostly a memoir of her childhood. As she said at the lecture, it isn’t the book she wanted to write, but the one that her publisher was willing to publish. Now that the book is a success, she expects to continue the story, because she sees her adult life as every bit as important as her childhood.
Even given the limitations, Taffa manages to mix in a lot of history with her personal memories. The history of forced assimilation, of boarding schools, of broken treaties, of massacres and police brutality. In many ways, the brutal history is a contrast to the way her parents found their way in the world and created a fairly functional family in spite of the generational trauma.
The book is also a love letter to her father.
Despite sometimes making poor choices, Taffa’s father comes across as a loving and thoughtful man, hard working, gentle, supportive, and endlessly curious. (She said at the lecture that he went back to community college at nearly 80 years old.) He was clearly the parent that she identified with the most, and the one who always had her back.
The family started out living on the Fort Yuma Reservation, which straddles the California and Arizona border. Her father is a Quechan member, so that was part of his ancestral homeland. He left with his family to get work in Farmington, New Mexico, near Four Corners. As this was adjacent to the Navajo Reservation, the author and her family were minorities within the Indigenous minority, not really accepted by the Navajo people in town.
In addition, her mother identified as Spanish. Which, as the author points out both in the book and in her lecture, really means that she had lost her knowledge of her Indigenous roots altogether, a tragedy of its own.
And, indeed, this is the irony of the legacy of colonialism: Latinx people are the descendants of the Indigenous peoples of the American continents, but are not recognized as the rightful occupants of our lands. “Assimilation” was more “successful” for them, their memories in many cases exterminated, and their history suppressed.
I have personal experience with one of the bizarre results of this. For the past 22 years, I have worked for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe as local California counsel for their juvenile dependency cases. The homeland for the tribe straddles the US/Mexico border in southern Arizona. This means that a Yaqui born in Arizona may be eligible for tribal membership, and is recognized as Native American. But a Yaqui born in Mexico is just a Mexican, and cannot legally travel to the US portion of their own homeland.
For the author, the tragedy is that the descendants of the original peoples of this hemisphere have allowed themselves to be separated by history and the politics of white supremacy rather than band together to address injustice.
The book covers a number of incidents, from family tragedies, to the good death of her grandmother, to incidents at the Catholic schools the kids attended, to the struggles of the author to find her place in the world during high school.
I’m not going to attempt to tell these stories - the author did so quite well herself, and I recommend getting the book for the full, true experience. Thus, I will focus a bit more on the history, while noting that the stories are the best part of the book.
I did want to mention a few other comments the author made at the lecture. First, she expressed frustration that the usual “Native American” story that gets told is one of trauma and pain. The “oppression porn” that all too often is what sells by white publishers to white readers.
This isn’t to say that those other stories shouldn’t be told, but that they aren’t entirely representative. Instead, she wants to tell what she sees as the more typical story, of human beings who are imperfect yet succeed in making beautiful lives for themselves anyway. That is her story. Yes, she had troubled times in her childhood, but there was also love and family and community. And she also grew to be a successful adult, finding her way in the world on a meandering path.
Taffa is right. Ultimately, she writes and teaches and lives her life. She seems like the sort that would be great to have over for dinner, honestly.
I also liked her comments about avoiding a homogenous way of telling stories. Too many memoirs tend to have the same pacing, the same style, the same dispassionate voice. Taffa writes like she speaks - and she speaks like a storyteller. It is no accident that she wrote this book in her 50s, when she decided she was ready. The book has that “DGAF” feel to it at times, where she clearly writes how she wants to write, making for a memorable voice.
The opening chapter, where she recounts a camping trip on the Animas River (and driving the Million Dollar Highway) was familiar - we drove that a couple summers ago. Taking the trailer on that crazy road was quite the experience.
This story leads into one of the most sordid events in California history, when the governor (in 1851) called for extermination of the Indigenous peoples, and distributed weapons and money to thugs to carry this out. (Proof that Trump is no aberration - this is a part of the white American character that has never gone away. We are, unfortunately, a vicious people.)
Taffa also mentions the First Battle of Pyramid Lake, which is detailed in The Bonanza King, which I read a few years ago. It is a great example of history which was whitewashed (in all senses) for much of history, but is now being told more accurately.
In another chapter, the author recounts the colonization of her mother’s ancestors.
Like many European explorers, Juan de Onate had arrived in Pueblo country under the guise of advancing Christianity. Of course, he’d really been looking to amass more wealth…
Thus now as then.
I should also mention the author’s spot-on analysis of how money has always driven racist beliefs. The “one drop rule” meant that one could enslave the descendants of Africans, no matter how much of the genome was European. One drop of “black blood,” and you were a slave.
But in contrast, the idea of “blood quantum” governed Indigenous membership. Since Native Americans were (mostly) not enslaved, they were seen as a cost, not a value. Thus, define them out of existence.
One of the highlights of the volunteer work I did on the Navajo Reservation as a teen was getting to meet one of the Code Talkers from World War Two. I am glad that they have gotten the credit they are due.
However, what is too often forgotten is that Native Americans across the United States served in World War Two. In fact, as the author points out, even before Pearl Harbor, one in ten Native American men had already enlisted in the armed forces. It is a shame that the American Right continues to denigrate the men and women of color - Black, Indigenous, Asian and others - who served disproportionately in our armed forces.
This disrespect haunted the author during her school days. As she notes after she was brutally assaulted by another girl and her father escalated the incident after the administration tried to suspend the author for being attacked, “White kids were innately civil, while brown kids - and brown parents who protested injustices - needed to have good manners imposed.”
By the way, her dad got the police report, calmly made his point and ended up prevailing. Badass.
The author’s relationship to Christianity is complicated. In many ways, she was drawn to the older rites of her ancestors, while her mother was a staunch Catholic. But, as has always happened in every culture, religious belief and observance was more of an amalgam of the old and the new.
Every religion (except maybe the prehistoric sun worship) has been syncretistic. There is no such thing as a “pure” religion that hasn’t drawn from prior beliefs and practices and from the cultures in which it exists.
Even a minimal examination of Euro-American “christian” holidays bears this out. Older pagan practices have been seamlessly imported into our beliefs - and often these make for a richer experience.
It is only white supremacy which privileges European pagan (and modern capitalist) ideas as being “true Christianity” while rejecting the hybrids and innovations created by believers of color.
I thought this passage was spot on, coming in an argument with her mother about holding both Tribal and Catholic beliefs and practices - like her father.
I meant what I said about Jesus. What could possibly be wrong with such a humble man? I loved the idea of him born in a manger under the night’s brightest star. I loved that he stuck up for slaves and the poor and scolded the rich for their greed. I loved that he cared for people, even when they reviled him. If I had a problem with anyone, I had a problem with his racist followers.
Yeah, me too.
Later, she felt bad because she went a bit too far with her mom. I feel that - I too had rough arguments with my mom as a teen. And in so many ways, they have never ended. Taffa talks about the difference between her and her mom - and this is exactly what I mean.
The sky was immense, and for the first time since I was a small child, I could feel what a mystery the universe was. My neck tingled. The hair on my arms stood up. The night felt spooky, and I understood that Mom tried to flatten the enormity of the sky, of the universe, out of fear. She needed two-dimensional constellations, easy explanations without anomalies, simple stories to feel like she could control the enormity of life, while Dad’s people could see that the universe wasn’t two-dimensional at all. There was more to life than we were living…And I resented the way Mom wanted to squeeze the terrific and terrifying into a set of linear, simple, and mind-numbing rules.
That is an incredibly accurate description of how fearful and rigid people like my mother cling to the religion of rules, and demand simplicity rather than nuance and the messy enormity of life.
Taffa goes on to tell of how that moment was a real break with her mother.
She could make the rules for our family, but she couldn’t control my mind.
Exactly. And then, at some point, she couldn’t make rules for me anymore. She has never stopped trying, though, threatening me with hell on my birthday last year because I don’t agree with her particular flavor of 19th Century, white male slaveholder theology. But she never could control my mind.
One final bit is worth quoting here.
Though I’d spent the summer bonding with my dad and my sisters about my struggles with assimilation, my mom hadn’t made as much of an effort to understand me. She still thought that prayer could solve all my problems, but I hated the church’s dogma. I couldn’t accept their stance on abortion, birth control, or the subservient role of women. Still, she was right about one thing. In moments of crisis, the prayers did help.
Prayer cannot solve our problems. That much is clear from nearly 50 years of living. It hasn’t solved mine. It certainly hasn’t solved a single one of my mom’s problems. But communion with the Divine, particularly as a practice to focus one’s self in order to take action, has been meaningful to me. I, like the author, just understand it differently.
I’m glad I got to read this book and hear the author in person. I eagerly await her next book.