The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.
While Gertrude Stein may have been speaking ironically with her famous quote about her hometown of Oakland, CA (“There is no there there”), author Tommy Orange is writing more literally when he references Stein for the title of his novel about Oakland-based “Urban Indians”, There There; what once existed for the Indigenous peoples of the Oakland area has been paved over and colonised by others; there is no longer anything of theirs there. But that's not to say that the Indigenous peoples themselves are gone: By telling the stories of twelve area Urban Indians, and having them converge at the Big Oakland Powwow, Orange blends the modern with the traditional, with storytelling playing a huge role in helping these people to understand themselves and where they came from. There's plenty of grit and unhappiness in these stories, but there's also the love of family and the rediscovery of traditions that offer a type of tentative redemption; until everything careens towards a tense and inevitable conclusion. This isn't perfect storytelling, but it feels important and necessary; Tommy Orange has written an engaging book that adds an oft neglected voice to the American experience.
Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred year genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours. We didn't get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. We bought and rented homes, slept on the streets, under freeways; we went to school, joined the armed forces, populated Indian bars in the Fruitland in Oakland and in the Mission in San Francisco. We lived in boxcar villages in Richmond. We made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. We did not move to cities to die.There There has a prologue and a midpoint Interlude which afford Tommy Orange opportunities to address the readers directly and remind us of the colonisers' crimes against the original inhabitants of the Americas. But while this history is undeniably inexcusable to the modern reader, Orange doesn't overtly blame the White Man for where his characters find themselves in the present – these aren't helpless or agentless less-than-citizens, but a community of individuals struggling to define themselves in modern day America; and like other “racialised” people, these characters have the opportunity to seek pride from their traditions in the face of entrenched societal discrimination. But that's not to say that life is easy for the characters that Orange introduces us to: one is a young adult who was born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, more than one other is a struggling or recovering alcoholic; families are broken, with missing or murdered fathers/grandmothers raising their grandkids/mothers succumbing to disease or suicide or simply walking away; poor kids from the wrong side of town who become gangsters; more than one biracial character who struggles with the oppressor/oppressed warring within himself; more than one character who can only discover what it means to be “Indian” from the Internet. Each of the characters has been formed by unique pressures and circumstances – underlining the fact that there is no monolith of American Indian experience – and some have found meaning and some have found heartache and some have found nihilism; just like in every other community. Even so, the author never lets us forget that these characters have been formed by pressures unique to their own community – there's no blame, really, but the effects of colonisation can never be ignored.
I'm here to collect stories in order to have them available online for people from our community and communities like ours to hear and see. When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less alone. When you feel less alone, and like you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can live a better life.In a way, Dene Oxendene feels like the center of the whole novel: Having inherited a movie camera from his dead uncle, Dene applies for, and receives, a grant to film a documentary of Urban Indian stories. As the novel rotates between its twelve points-of-view, not only do Dene's sections show the young man asking people for their stories, but whenever the POV shifted to someone else's narrative, it felt in my mind like we were witnessing the completed stories that Dene might have collected. (In the Acknowledgments at the end, Orange thanks the “Oakland Cultural Arts Fund, for funding a storytelling project that never came to fruition except for in fiction”, which makes me wonder if Orange had once thought to film the stories of Urban Indians; which makes me wonder if the Dene character is closest to an avatar of Orange himself.) Storytelling is the heart of this book: One character has a Masters in comparative literature with an emphasis on Native American Literature; grandmothers tell the old stories, mothers sing traditional lullabies, men beat the drums and chant in the old ways; a dying woman says, “We shouldn't ever not tell our stories”, that “the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories”; those disconnected from traditional storytellers can find them online; participants at an AA meeting are encouraged to share their stories.
The problem with Indigenous art in general is that it's stuck in the past. The catch, or the double bind, about the whole thing is this: If it isn't pulling from tradition, how is it Indigenous? And if it is stuck in tradition, in the past, how can it be relevant to other Indigenous people living now, how can it be modern?Tommy Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma (as are some of his characters), and he also has an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts (where he studied under Sherman Alexie); with these influences, Orange seems to have found the perfect balance between the traditional and the modern in There There: characters might end up at a powwow, but they use 3-D printers, drones, and cell phones to get there; those who put on borrowed regalia to participate in the dancing find it doesn't fit quite right, but they still appreciate the power it gives them. Twelve points-of-view might be too many to keep straight in the reader's mind, and I'm undecided whether or not the ending was earned – which is why I don't think this is perfect storytelling – but I completely appreciate what Orange has achieved here and am pleased to see that this book has found a wide audience.
