Whiskey Tender: A Memoir of Family and Survival on and off the Reservation

by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Instead, my new history teacher taught us that “Indians” had been misnamed because explorers thought they had landed in Hindustan. He didn’t say we had 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, each with distinctive stories, languages, arts, social structures, travel patterns, and spirituality.

Out in the sandstone canyons, against the earth’s history, the millennia revealed in the sandstone’s strata, the ephemeral nature of my body was brought into relief. The earth humbled me and reminded me that others had come before, and others would come after. Nothing lasted forever, even the pain I was feeling in my daily life.

“Stay focused on your family and faith, no matter how you define it,”

Barry Lopez wrote, “If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.”