There There – A Spellbinding Exploration of Native American Identity

“They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.”

Tommy Orange’s bracing debut novel There There (published June 2018) sets to reclaim the modern ‘Indian’ narrative (or to use the politically correct term ‘Native American’), which has been hijacked by white historians’ sanitized, faux-heroic tales and Hollywood’s binary portrayal of the persecuted Natives as either stoic side-kicks or dreadful savages. Not that Mr. Orange in this process of reclamation through stories perfectly delineates the so-called ‘Indianness’. If anything, the author’s reflection on ‘being Indian’ (using overlapping stories of 12 different characters) is punctuated with a sense of bewilderment and obscurity. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen”, a grandmother tells her teenage grandson in the novel, which (as with any fraught identities) echoes ambivalent feelings (scattered throughout the narration) when it comes to defining the Native Americans’ plight in the ‘land of dreams’.

There There opens with a devastating prologue which laments the blood-soaked history of Indians made possible by the Western invaders. The prologue sharply remarks how these maimed, dispersed, mocked, cheated, exiled, and neglected people were forced to define and re-define their identities for centuries amidst the relentless assault waged by the winners’ wrongful historical accounts. Orange’s righteous fury glows throughout this essay, referencing to white America’s plethora of atrocities and subjugation tactics directed towards the continent’s indigenous population.  Then the book jumps to introducing us a group of loosely connected Native American residents from Oakland, California. This largest cast of Indians – young and old, poor and middle-class, male and female, naïve and worldly, alcoholics and master-degree holders – are all preparing (for various reasons) for the national powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. The fates of these diverse voices gradually converge at the single point of Oakland powwow. The powwow of 21^st century America itself represents the ambivalent, evasive identity of an ‘Indian’, while the characters struggle with ways to see themselves as an ‘authentic Indian’.

Orange’s narrative is free from mythologization, sentimentality, stereotypes, and one-note sadness. On the outset, the characters’ lives are beset with familiar issues (inflicted upon universally among indigenous population by the victorious colonial powers) like alcoholism, unemployment, underemployment, criminality, depression, and alienation. But the way Orange empathetically reflects on these problems brilliantly touches upon the pain of a history and a community, long suppressed by falsehoods. The novel’s primarily introduced character Tony Loneman has fetal alcohol syndrome (due to his pregnant mother’s drinking), which he calls ‘Drome’. “It’s the way history lands on a face” Orange writes, absorbingly relating the bitterness of the present with the subjugation of the past. Thomas Frank is a half-white, half-Indian character, who struggles to reconcile with his dual identity. The author sharply draws this inner conflict like this: “You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken”.

Tommy Orange

Dene Oxedene, who tries to honor his ethnicity and his late-uncle by committing to an oral-history project, comments: “the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general, it’s too sad, so sad it can’t even be entertaining, but more importantly because of the way it’s been portrayed, it looks pathetic, and we perpetuate that, but not, fuck that, excuse  my language, but it makes me mad, because the whole picture is not pathetic, and the individual people and stories that you come across are not pathetic or weak or in need of pity, and there’s real passion there, and rage….” In fact, Orange’s individual tales shatters the usual trajectory of ‘Indian’ narrative as demanded in Oxedene’s meaningful lecture. Of course, these ostracized individuals’ plights are laced with a note of sadness, yet Orange imbues a distinct mix of humor, rage, and plaintiveness that it collectively offers a powerful, multi-layered ‘present tense’ statement on the native life. If some stories could perpetuate wooden stereotypes about a group of people then, Orange seems to say, the rightful tales can also render the truth of experiences, often brushed aside by ignorant historians and those with power.

There There delivers great emotional impact as it accelerates towards the terrifying and tense climax. Nevertheless, the novel doesn’t veer into melodrama, filled with mawkish reunions and eleventh-hour epiphany. “Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now”, writes the author in the incendiary prologue, and the truth of those words is sorrowfully (and literally) demonstrated in the quick-cutting final chapters. The unaddressed morbid effects of the abusive, genocidal, racist history of a nation keeps revisiting even in the seemingly joyous 21^st century gathering, but still Tommy Orange withholds hope in the complex present tense identity of the American ‘Indian’, who keeps on overturning the preconceived notions through their challenging stories.  Overall, There There is a blistering examination of what it means to be a Native American who is “alive, modern, and relevant.”