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- By Native News Online Staff
The American Indian College Fund (College Fund) is hosting a free, online book and author event for the public featuring author Deborah Taffa on November 26 from 12-1 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Taffa will discuss her new book, Whiskey Tender, with College Fund President, Cheryl Crazy Bull.
Taffa, a member of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and the Laguna Pueblo of New Mexico from her father’s side and Chicana from her mother’s side, is director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, a tribal college. Taffa wrote the acclaimed coming-of-age memoir Whiskey Tender, which was nominated for a 2024 National Book Award.
Her book shares her journey from the Yuma reservation in Southern California to Farmington, New Mexico after her father relocated for a job under the Indian Relocation Act. She details her struggles for acceptance while seeking to understand her connection to her Native culture, lands, and traditions, and how she came to appreciate her identity and resist assimilation and oppression.
“Part of reclaiming our sovereignty as Native people is reclaiming the power to tell our own stories from a perspective that is a truer version of American history than the one that gets told,” Taffa says.
Whiskey Tender has received a slew of accolades from the Oprah Daily “Best New Book” to the New York Times “New Book to Read,” an Amazon Editors “Best Book of the Month,” and is a 2024 National Book Award finalist in nonfiction and a 2025 Carnegie Medal Nominee.
Visit https://engage.collegefund.
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