Whiskey Tender: A Memoir

She drove me home in silence. Back then, there was always silence. I couldn't speak up, I realize now, because protest requires hope.

This story is as common as dirt. Thousands of Native Americans in California, Arizona, and New Mexico could tell it. Anyone with a grandpa who was haunted by Indian boarding school, who stung his family like a dust devil when he drank. Anyone with a grandma who washed laundry until her fingernails cracked and bled, who went without eating when there weren’t enough groceries because she wanted her ten kids to have a few extra bites. Anyone with a mother who kept secrets so her kids wouldn’t find out about their father’s jailbird past. Anyone with a father who chose the violence of industrial labor over the violence of reservation life because he wanted his kids to get through private school and make better lives for themselves. So many people could tell this story, it is shocking how rarely it has been told. Too many mothers have watched their kids thrown into cop cars without protest. Too many aunties have put ice on black eyes without saying a word. Too many grandmothers have watched their grandchildren, their hope for the future, head out to a party and never come home. Too many girls have pretended nothing happened after experiencing sexual harassment, only to redirect the hate toward the innocent face staring back at them in the mirror.

Trees and cacti are social beings. The earth’s plants use electric signals through a fungal network to warn one another of danger. They watch, keep track, and remember. They nourish the stumps of fallen companions for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots. They nourish and nurse the sick, including me.

We had always been both everywhere and nowhere

it would not have alleviated his cultural cringe

and this ensured that years later I would have to live with the insult of how vague my self-awareness was

And some lessons must be learned more than once

Injustice was when someone privileged like me, someone who has reaped the benefits of money, comfort, and electricity, turned around and vilified a struggling Father who is trying to take care of his kids.

At school, my science teacher talked about the ozone layer even as aerosol hairspray kept clouding the bathroom stalls. I tried to tell Mom about climate change, but she acted like I was gullible. If I was mad about losing our land, I was even angrier about what they'd done to it. While I still didn't know about the massacres, I knew enough to feel robbed. Manhatten was purchased with beads. Valuable furs had been traded for whiskey. White people used empty promises as tender, and in exchange, we Indians got blood quantum, our lineages tracked like thoroughbreds or dogs, destined to be turned into glue.

Granny Ethel insisted, claiming they needed a Western education if they wanted to avoid being swindled by unethical people who weaponized numbers and words.

I may have been born into a poor reservation world, but Dad said we came from a family of tribal leaders, and I was destined to do great things. I had the beauty and talent to rise above my half-breed status. I was destined for a better life, and Sadie had walked thirty miles to kiss me because she smelled my bright future on my cheeks.

Speaking to the U.S. vice president, leaders of the Iroquois Nation said, “We represent the oldest, though smallest, democracy in the world today. . . . It is the unanimous sentiment among the Indian people that the atrocities of the Axis nations are violently repulsive to all sense of righteousness of our people.” The Navajo Nation’s council pledged their loyalty “to the system which recognizes minority rights.

My father was born in 1941 and he taught me never to confuse pity with comprehension. His Quechan (Yuma) grandfather was born in a time when California’s Indian population had plummeted 90 percent because of foreign diseases, Catholic slave-labor, and the government’s hiring of private militia to bring in Indian scalps. California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, openly promoted genocide, calling for “a war of extermination” in his 1851 second state address. With the help of the U.S. Army, the California legislature distributed weapons to vigilantes, who raided Native homes and killed 100,000 of my ancestors in the first two years of the gold rush alone. The legislature paid $1.1 million to these murderers, and when it was done, the U.S. Congress agreed to reimburse the state.

My Laguna grandmother, Esther, is the one who taught me that a deep intimacy with a homeland requires three things: sensory experiences of particular geographies, a storied history of the trails, and a deep caring about them.