spoilers ahead
There, there. A comforting murmur we use to coax our children to sleep, to temper a frightened dog, to console ourselves in times of panic and pain. I wish I could tell you there was an easy sort of comfort to Tommy Orange’s debut, There There, a happy ending in which all was resolved and discovered, issues unearthed and then laid to rest again by the final period. There is no such comfort to be gained here. This book is a lens, many lenses, analyzing what it means to be Native, yesterday and today. No one more than Orange or his characters realize how very complex and complicated that notion is.
There There is a multi-generational tale told from the shifting perspectives of thirteen Natives, adults and children, living, working, and trudging through their lives in Oakland, California. The novel is divided into four sections (titled “Remain, “Reclaim,” “Return,” and “Powwow” respectively) and features a livid prologue and lit interludes that slice through the narratives with biting ease, drawing attention to specific moments or images or illusions. The poetic nature of this work does not hide hard truths, but amplifies them, as is depicted in the essay-like opening that pinpoints the bizarre history of Indian heads: Native chief Metacomet who “was beheaded and dismembered. (…) Metacomet’s head was sold to Plymouth Colony for thirty shillings—the going rate for an Indian head at the time”; the “successful massacre” in Manhattan in 1637 in which “people were said to have celebrated by kicking the heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls”; the “old Cheyenne story about a rolling head”; the “drawing of the head of a headdressed, long-haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the late 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out”; or even Mel Gibson’s depiction of “the heads rolling down temple stairs in a world meant to resemble the real Indian world in the 1500s in Mexico.”
“One thing we should keep in mind,” Orange reminds his readers in the midst of all the head-rolling, “is that no one ever rolled heads down temple stairs.” That, and so much of Native history as has been taught, was fictionalized. Orange’s work is here to set the record straight, to let his characters tell in own voice what it means in this day and age to be Native. “We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people,” Orange says. “Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours.”
These thirteen characters show the full versatility and variety of the Natives living in Oakland, as well as farther afield, but each are drawn together by one overarching theme—the big event—the Big Oakland Powwow. But what even is a powwow, one young character, Loother Red Feather, asks. His older brothers Orvil and Lony laugh at him but don’t ultimately answer—they don’t know either. Their aunt, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, one of the other narrators, has hidden that part of their history from the boys, discouraged them from asking anything to do with their Native culture:
Ever since they [Orvil and his brothers] were in her care, Opal had been openly against any of them doing anything Indian. She treated it all like it was something they could decide for themselves when they were old enough. Like drinking or driving or smoking or voting. Indianing.
Opal has her reasons for what might be considered cutting off her young nephews from pivotal parts of their lives and identities. Her twisted, tangled story and tribal involvement is an open, aching wound for Opal that she struggles to overcome. Her nephews, though, have no experience with their ancestral roots, good or bad. Orvil in particular is nervously keen on learning about it, and he signs up to dance in the Big Oakland Powow even without an idea of what that will require of him. The juxtaposition of Opal and Orvil demonstrates the discrepancies between what it means to be Native for each individual character: for some, it is not an active thing. It is the color of their skin and the shape of their eyes but it is not part of how they live day-to-day. All Natives are not born one and the same, even if they do belong to the same tribe and heritage. They are not all born inheriting the knowledge of their ancestors on how and who to be as Native Americans.
There There is a novel that serves not only to entertain, as witty, humorous, and well-written as it is, but also as a platform from which to clarify or condemn misinformation surrounding Urban Indians. So many of the characters don’t know what that means, to be Native, to be part of a community, to be themselves. They have their stories, collected not only in this book, but collected and shared—or not shared—within the book. Dene Oxendene uses a video camera specifically to capture the stories of the Native community in their own words. Others describe Dene as: “a young guy in a baseball cap with an indistinct tribal pattern on it. If he didn’t have that hat,” Calvin, who works with Dene wonders, “[he] doesn’t know if he’d have guessed he’s Native.” Dene has applied for a grant to “document Indian stories in Oakland.” He aims to “let them tell their stories with no one else there, with nor direction or manipulation or agenda.” The result, then, is that Dene will “bring something new to the vision of the Native experience as it’s seen on the screen. We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story.” This is a very meta, self-aware novel, with the loop of characters telling their stories in this novel comprised of stories. Orange uses Dene’s videocamera as a way to capture on film what Orange is capturing on paper—the stories of real Natives. And those are hard stories to tell.
There, there—a comfort to a child. No such comforts exist in this book. The Urban Indian with urban problems. There is no escaping the Native history of alcohol, suicide, plague of the mind and body, but these histories alone are not what make the characters what they are. These generalizations and stereotypes do not make up Native people. There is an honor to recognizing these parts of themselves and not hiding their histories but in making and naming them. But with that comes the new problems to be faced with living in the city: violence, drugs, suicide, depression, alcoholism and substance abuse. Those problems are not relegated to the reservations or to just this group of people, but the scope of the issues are magnified and intensified with the steadily increasing volume of people inhabiting the same small spaces.
The arcing, scattered storylines of so many characters can be deceivingly interconnected. One cannot help but sense the struggle of community here in this work: so many characters the reader is unsure how they all connect beyond the draw of the powwow, until deeper truths are revealed. On the day of the powwow some of them go for the money, the cache of Visa gift cards ripe for the taking. Some of them, having worked from the very start to bring about and organize the powwow, are thrilled as the stadium fills with the smell of fry bread, the laughs and cries of children and old friends. The reclusive Calvin Johnson watches from the dark comfort of his basement as the powwow begins, overseeing from the eyes of his remote-controlled drone buzzing overhead. While the book begins with a list of the violence committed against Native people by colonists and invaders to their land, the ultimate violence of the book is committed by themselves, Natives, against themselves.
What happens there at the powwow shakes and shatters and restructures the lives of all who see, of all who attend. It is impossible to tell by the last page how resolution will follow—but it must, and it will. Orange has shown us the resilience, if anything, of these characters. No one in this book is as alone as they think, but the dramatic irony of this novel pervades every corner: characters go on stumbling past one another, oblivious to the connections and family and blood they share, and it takes a big event—the Big Oakland Powwow—to both bring those people together and, ultimately, to tear them apart.
And through it all, a white gun. Is the symbolism intentional? How could it not be? Orange has come too far to not know what he has done with this work such as to set a lit white gun into the middle of the table at which these characters sit, or perhaps, as it were, onto the middle of the pounding drum that drew them all together in the first place.
A poignant and unforgiving tale, There There by Tommy Orange is a magnificent and triumphant debut. Orange is a new writer to watch and a new voice to be heard.