Enter the vibrant landscapes of the American Southwest, where memory, law, and spirit converge and witness a family’s resilience against systemic erasure. Navigate the profound spiritual connections between land and ancestry in this conversation between Whiskey Tender author Deborah Jackson Taffa and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, novelist, non-fiction author, and Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, to reclaim a more honest American history. Traverse the emotional bridge connecting enduring wisdom and a deeper sense of belonging that challenges us to consider personal narratives as essential tools for social justice and cultural preservation.
This event is sponsored by Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Creative Writing Program, Department of English, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, The Graduate School, Department of American Studies, Institute for Social Concerns, Teaching Beyond the Classroom Grants, The Brookline Booksmith Transnational Literature Series and the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good/Henkels Grant.
Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a research collective, conversation series, and digital archive dedicated to contemporary literature shaped by exile, transnational migration, and human rights violations. The series brings Southwest and Southeast Asian and North African writers and artists into sustained dialogue with American writers and scholars to imagine new modes of literary production across borders and cultivate intersectional solidarities. The series was developed as a global public humanities project in partnership with institutes and initiatives both within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, and was founded by author and Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at Notre Dame, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in 2020.
Deborah Jackson Taffa’s Whiskey Tender provides a robust historiographical intervention, challenging the sanitized, linear narratives that dominate American pedagogy. This memoir serves as a reparative archive, bridging the distance between intimate trauma and the cold architecture of federal policy. Taffa explores the “liminal space”—a metaphysical threshold between the visible and the spiritual—exemplified by her “sandstorm dream” while following her mother’s funeral transport. Grounded in the Ikimma experience, this tribal philosophy prioritizes a dream-oriented existence over Western materialism. By operating within this liminality, Taffa employs a methodology that resists the historical impulse to render Indigenous life worlds invisible. The author masterfully deconstructs the hegemony of federal power through the lens of family intimacy. She recounts her parents’ wedding day car accident, where the divergent treatment of her Yuma father and her Catholic, “Hispanic” mother highlighted the racialized gaze of state authorities. This event is not merely a family anecdote but a visceral reflection of systemic structures like the Indian Relocation Act (Public Law 959). Such policies sought to domesticate Indigenous populations into the gears of industrial labor, framing Native private history as a perpetual public negotiation with Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) mandates. Taffa critiques education as both a tool of erasure and a mechanism for survival. She highlights the cognitive dissonance of a high school curriculum that relegated her ancestors to sanitized footnotes of “death and destruction,” intentionally ignoring that two-thirds of the world’s global food crops and complex astronomical architectures like Chaco Canyon or Chichén Itzá originated in the Americas. Furthermore, she reveals how Indigenous societies nurtured sophisticated concepts of childhood and leisure long before their European counterparts. For Taffa’s father, however, excelling in this colonial meritocracy was a necessary act of protection, demanding a partial relinquishment of the ancestral self to secure social stability. Finally, Taffa addresses the tension between her creative act and the tribal philosophy of non-materialism. Historically, her people practiced the ritual burning of a deceased person’s possessions—and houses—to prevent grasping at the transitory world. By documenting her family in a memoir, Taffa engages in a “rebellious” act of preservation. This is a deliberate negotiation of sovereignty against the tides of settler-colonialism; in a capitalist society determined to erase Native history through neglect, the published book becomes a sacred, resistant object that refuses to let the ancestral story be consumed by silence. In her mother’s home of Socorro, Taffa unearths the history of the Genízaros—Indigenous people enslaved and stripped of tribal identity by figures like Juan de Oñate. Her mother’s choice to identify as “Hispanic” was not merely a rejection of blood, but a protective shielding against centuries of systemic violence and the rigid hierarchies of the Catholic Church. Ultimately, Taffa’s personal journey reflects the broader mission of the “Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance” series. Her work demonstrates that literature is not just a form of expression, but a site of active defiance and a means of reclaiming moral and intellectual sovereignty over one’s own history within a world that prizes forgetting over truth.
Evaluate the Concept of “Nuclear Colonization”: Analyze the enduring impact of the Jackpile Mine and underground nuclear detonations on Indigenous land sovereignty. Taffa argues that the “toxic waste” poisoning Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo lands is a direct consequence of a settler-colonialism that prioritizes national security over Native life.
The Archive as a Living Ethical Practice: Move beyond viewing the archive as a static repository. By documenting histories systematically threatened by erasure, the writer transforms the archive into a tool of reparative justice and active witnessing.
Identity as Creative Genius: Shift the paradigm from viewing mixed-tribe identity as a “tragic” crisis to a source of creative power. Drawing on and subverting the work of Erik Erikson, Taffa posits that standing on the threshold between worlds allows for a multifaceted vantage point essential for cultural innovation.
Reciprocity vs. Transactional Land Use: Contrast the colonial view of land as an extractable frontier with the Indigenous view of land as an “older sibling.” This reciprocal relationship is presented not as a relic of the past, but as a vital curative for modern climate catastrophes.
Survival as an Act of Beauty: Critique the framing of Indigenous history solely through trauma. The maintenance of joy, functional family lives, and communal generosity serves as a profound form of resistance against a history that predicted and planned for Native demise.
“I really wish they had taught us about the complicated astronomies and math and architecture that it took to build a place like Chaco Canyon or Chichén Itzá or Machu Picchu. I wish they had taught us that two-thirds of the world’s crops came from the Americas.” — Deborah Jackson Taffa
“The ceremony itself is a material thing. And if it has died naturally in this way, it means that it’s no longer healing and creating what we want it to do. Otherwise, it would have not died. We’re not going to grasp on to it because the ceremony and the song are material things.” — Deborah Jackson Taffa
“I tell him all the time, I’m like, you know, if you have joy in your life, joy is a form of resistance for someone from your history. Because we were never expected to be happy. We were not supposed to be functional in healthy relationships.” — Deborah Jackson Taffa
“Taffa shows us how language mediates sovereignty and belonging and how education itself becomes a site of translation at once a means of survival and a mechanism of erasure.” — Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
“I’m very tired of the narratives about half breeds that treat us as tragic. I think even in the work of Erik Erikson… he says that forestalling a solid identity in some people does become a struggle, but in other people it creates creative genius.” — Deborah Jackson Taffa
