Whiskey Tender

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2024

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Literary Context: Indigenous American Literature and the Memoir

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

Whiskey Tender joins a small-but-growing collection of memoirs written by Indigenous American authors. Taffa addresses the lack of Indigenous memoirs at the opening of the text, describing her desire to fill the void. She attributes the lack of memoirs to “taboos” against “talking to outsiders” and “belief systems [that] go against this kind of preservation and self-telling” (7-8). However, she insists that Indigenous people self-narrating their own stories is a key part of reclaiming their history and heritage and helping “Native kids to feel more connected and less lonely” (8).

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Indigenous American literature is a diverse and complicated field, as writers come from a variety of tribes with vastly different literary and storytelling traditions. Before the European conquest, literary traditions were primarily oral, but some tribes had written methods for transcribing language, such as hieroglyphs and pictographs. Some early Indigenous writers working in English had political motives: They hoped to raise awareness among white readers to better position Indigenous people in American culture and society. By the mid-1960s, the so-called Native American Renaissance was beginning. Amid an explosion of fiction and poetry by Indigenous American writers, key figures in Indigenous American literature emerged, including Simon Ortiz’s My Father’s Song, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, the latter of whom became the first Indigenous writer to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. Today, some of the best-known Indigenous American writers include Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, The Round House, The Night Watchman) Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), and Tommy Orange (There There).

Historical Context: The Cultural Assimilation of Indigenous People in the United States

Beginning in the mid-19th century, the United States began concerted efforts to disappear Indigenous American populations by encouraging cultural assimilation and incorporation into mainstream American society. These efforts consisted of a series of policies intended to “civilize” Indigenous people by forcing them to adopt European-style customs, language, and religion. As the United States continued to expand westward, many tribes were forcibly resettled onto increasingly smaller plots of land. Cultural assimilation was seen as a way to do away with these semi-sovereign Indigenous nations and claim their remaining land. In 1887, the US government passed the Dawes Act, which divided reservations into small allotments of land given to individual tribe members, breaking up communally held land and allowing the US government to sell any “surplus” land after it had been divided. This greatly reduced the amount of land held by Indigenous people.

Another important assimilation strategy was the “Indian boarding schools” that were established for Indigenous students. These schools forced students to speak English, practice Christianity in place of their tribal religions, wear European-style clothing, and take new names. Children were isolated from their families, and reports of abuse were widespread. Enrollment in such schools continued to grow until 1978 when the Indian Child Welfare Act gave Indigenous parents the right to refuse their children’s admission to these schools. Other aspects of the government’s “Termination Policy” included policies like the Relocation Program, which provided incentives like job training for Indigenous people to move from reservations. The US government hoped that they would start families with non-Indigenous Americans and that their children would eventually no longer qualify for tribal membership. Taffa argues that these policies rarely made Indigenous lives better, as the US government suggested. Rather, they primarily “succeeded in isolating many people from their families and culture” (37). Whiskey Tender is a story about the far-reaching ramifications of these assimilation policies and how separation from one’s culture, community, and history has potentially devastating effects on identity and sense of self.