In 1976, when Deborah Jackson Taffa was 6 years old, her father uprooted their family for a career opportunity. Such upheavals are common, but for Taffa, the move marked the start of an identity crisis. She had spent her early years on the Quechan (Yuma) reservation in southeastern California. There, her mixed-tribe, mixed-race family — her father Quechan and Laguna Pueblo, her mother mestiza, of mixed Spanish and Indigenous ancestry — struggled financially, but Taffa and her sisters were surrounded by extended family and Native heritage. In their new town of Farmington, N.M., on the edge of Navajo Nation, they were outsiders, both to the White world and to the area’s dominant tribal culture.