2024051002

The last assigned reading through weeks 12 and 13 of ETHNS 350 was There There, a novel published by Tommy Orange in 2018. Through a fictional medium with an expansive canvas of characters and just as large a timeframe, Orange portrays the experience of urbanized, digitalized Natives in both a time and a place close to this course’s own. The “present-day” is an early 21st-century Oakland, California, where 15 different characters’ perspectives as Natives are both divided and combined between a faint sense of community and a stronger sense of disorder and unbelonging.

Orange’s (2018) novel about Natives of various tribes, backgrounds, ages, and ultimately identities mixes with interludes in his own non-fictional voice. Orange retells history far behind the years in which the 15 perspectives live, from pre-contact to annihilation, assimilation, and then termination and relocation. He discusses the tropes and stereotypes which make up the “common Indian” in modern day, and then how the most recent generation of Natives are largely “Urban Indians”: Natives accultured to an industrial, technological revolution that contrasts the common images of today. He includes all of this in a preface to the first parts of There There with stanzas by Bertolt Brecht, a part of a poem that precluded Brecht’s career as a director who violently reminded his audience of the fictional nature of his work even as they related to its elements and made them question and criticize their relationship to it through its end.

With part of the necessary historical context established, Orange (2018) begins his story in the shoes of Tony Loneman, a Native freshly turned 21 whose life was shaped by a mom who now hardly exists. Loneman’s mother is never addressed again, but her presence and the first representation of the disillusioned, 20th-century alcoholic establishes the double-sided foundation for Orange’s novel. Loneman inherits the trauma of his mother via fetal alcoholic syndrome and a refusal to drink. A few minutes away, Dene Oxendene recalls his experience with his uncle, a filming assistant who dies from liver failure, and his wish to fund and finish his uncle’s Native-centric film project after his death. In part one of Orange’s novel, appropriately titled “Remain”, Loneman, Oxendene, and two other characters—Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Edwin Black—narrate their experiences as young adults of the Urban Indian generation. All have lost a parent in some way, and all have been disconnected from their lives either accultured to Californian life or to their Native pasts. “Remain” explains that the novel’s title, There There, is a reference to a quote from Gertrude Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography. Oakland “developed over… [an] unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there” (Orange, 2018). But it also manages to recontextualize “There There”, a single by Radiohead (2003), which sings, “Just ’cause you feel it / doesn’t mean it’s there” The novel’s setting is disjointed by 15 perspectives, three point-of-view forms, and scrambling through past memories and rapid-fire present-day that all utilize an industrialized new world. But in the same city, buried beneath technological innovation and social growth, are the lingering traces of a past that influences future generations, even if it cannot be seen or felt.

There There, at large, is about 15 people that should be united as a community. Over the span of several months, 15 different people find their way to “the Big Oakland Powwow” for various motives (Orange, 2018). All share the trait of being Native and of living in an urban area for the majority of their lives, but the surface-level similarities end there. In reality, many of them are connected by blood, but the trauma and actions of the past have long separated them. The characters use the Oakland powwow to reconnect, to find their place in a city that violently rejects and ignores them as anomalies, and to survive the systems that long abandoned them. When the powwow, a decidedly vibrant symbol of “[feeling] specifically Indian”, arrives in the final part, it should represent a unity between the 15 characters; and, at first, it does. Ultimately, however, There There ends in a tragedy which cleaves this microcosm of the Oakland Native community again. When the group that chose to rob the powwow together splits apart, the other bonds forged through the powwow follow. Both members of the robbers and members of the other families are killed, and the fate of those who others could cooperate to rescue end unknown. Orange forces the reader to theorize the future for the survivors of the powwow, the reasons for the “sudden” tragedy of the epilogue, and to, in Brechtian fashion, consider these elements from a real-life lens.

There There is ultimately a novel about intergenerational trauma and intergenerational loss. Every character in Orange’s work is affected by the changes of the 19th century: the termination and relocation policies, the American Indian Movement, and drafts into international war. Like the lyrics of “There There” and the quote in Everybody’s Autobiography, a legacy of loss, tragedy, and irrecoverable, unrepaired pain is not necessarily a physical one, but it haunts each character regardless. And There There is about confronting this trauma for once and for questioning “What next?”; the novel provokes its audience to see these characters’ struggles in real-life, “anomalous” Native peoples and question why tragedy affected them again. Now only the reader themselves can ask what the future holds for them and the survivors at the story’s end.