There There

“There is no there there.” This phrase sums up the experience of twelve Native Americans in this novel as they try to transition from reservations to life in modern American cities. The city in this case is Oakland. All of the Native American characters are trying to forge a new identity without completely losing their ties to the past. Dene Oxendene wants to make a film to capture the stories of urban Native Americans. He desperately needs a cultural arts grant to make that happen. Jacquie Red Feather is turning her life around after an alcohol addiction that has caused her to lose her kids to her sister. She wants to try to reconnect with them. Tony Loneman has problems fitting in. His problem isn’t so much that he’s Native American. It’s because he bears a daily physical reminder of his mother’s alcoholism. Tony has fetal alcohol syndrome. Then there’s Calvin Johnson. Calvin’s father abandoned him as a young boy, so he lives with his older sister. He’s not taking the medicine that helps to manage his bipolar disorder. These are a few of the people who are drawn to attend the Big Oakland Powwow. The promise of connecting to their history and moving forward in their lives is the motivation for many of the attendees. The motives of several of the people coming to the festival aren’t so pure. They intend to steal the money the festival generates, and they have a plan to do it. Everyone who comes to the Big Oakland Powwow will have their lives changed permanently. Each chapter of the novel follows one of the twelve characters. As I was reading, I couldn’t help but feel the building tension as each character moved toward the destination of the powwow. This is one of those reads where you trust the author is taking you somewhere to show you something important. The climax is heart-wrenching. Tommy Orange’s debut novel gives readers a glimpse into the lives of Native Americans trying to find a way to build lives in modern America without losing their history and identities. The book is funny, wise, raw, and overwhelmingly sad. Anyone who likes to read well-written books about Native Americans and the struggles they face will find this one riveting.

I heard an interview with Tommy Orange and he was so thoughtful and intelligent... he had a deeply human way of talking about things and making connections that welcomed the listener into the conversation.

The minute I got home, I bought There There and dove into the world he had captured and the people he created to bring that world to life. It’s a phenomenal book. On top of a riveting story and characters that you invest in deeply, the story itself is so well-constructed, so intimately and carefully layered, that when you get to the end, you know you have just experienced a true work of art.

I recently went to a arts conference up at Western Washington University in Bellingham and an elder from the Lummi Nation was speaking about language and placenames. I have always considered myself a local. I was born here. I am invested in this town and in the surrounding land. It means something to me, very dear and very real. But listening to him, it dawned on me (duh) that I am a colonist. Maybe an accidental colonist, but still. When I’ve talked to others about it, I’ve been met with hostility and racism and ignorance. People denigrating and undermining what the Lummi people went through, minimizing their value so as to make it okay that we non-Natives are here and the reservation is small. Finally, I could hear it for myself. The language and reasoning of colonization - the mindset of takers who don’t want to feel bad for taking. We were raised in a community that looks down on the people who actually belong here... which is such a sick and backward and unhealthy way to think and act. It’s been strange to see myself that way, as a colonist. But once I realized that we’re no different than the Boers of South Africa or the non-natives of New Zealand and Australia and Hawaii and Fiji and... I mean... this is a bloody and unhealthy legacy.

And then this book comes at that issue from the other side. I needed to hear this. I needed to read this. And I think we need to reorganize how we teach history and culture. Not once did I learn anything about the Lummi Nation in school. Not once did a teacher explain to me that Whatcom - the name of our lake and creek - meant “the sound of water going over stones.” I would’ve liked to have known those things. I think it would’ve connected me in a deeper way to the place where I live, but also it would’ve given every single kid in that classroom the message that the people who were here first are important, are still here, and are a key part of our history. Instead, we learned about the colonists. The loggers and mill owners. The early settlers. And the message was clear, even by third grade: We were the winners. They were the losers. And that’s a messed up message to send. But you can hear it in the way people talk in my town. They don’t see the Lummi Nation as survivors, as people who maintained their culture and their language and who thrived against all odds. They don’t see themselves as the beneficiaries of their colonist ancestors. They live in a fantasy. And, from what I can tell, when you’re living in a fantasy, you can’t accurately solve things in the real world.

I think this book will help wake people up. Natives and non-Natives alike. It’s also a fantastic book and stands on its own merit as an amazing piece of writing.

Y’all. This book. It packs a punch like no other, and I was captivated by it as the stories began to intertwine and come to a head, to one final moment that brings the characters all together in this gripping tale transcending multiple generations. Gripping is an understatement… when all was said and done, and the novel stopped, I felt myself continue to lurch forward with momentum. I don’t think I can express how deep and beautiful this novel is. I can’t do it justice. But let me back up.

Tommy Orange’s novel is difficult to start. When I first began listening via audiobook, I thought I was going to hate it. It didn’t make sense to me. The prologue, which is part of the novel and should be read, begins with a candid retelling of history as North Americans know it–laying bare what the history books don’t teach us, shedding light on the part of history that we’d like to forget and sweep under a rug, never to be seen again. I thought to myself, “is this novel a history lesson?”. No. But yes. Though fictitious, it has many truths, and the experiences of many of these characters are unfortunately all too real. Because those affected by our nation’s bloody history in the past are still affected by it in our present, which Orange makes explicitly clear as his novel commences with the first story from our twelve narrators, Tony Loneman. Truth be told, the first story, Tony’s story, was not how I’d start this novel. I found it a bit dry, and I wasn’t sure where Orange was going with the novel. Then the second narrator took over, and I didn’t see any obvious connections, and I was wondering, “is this novel just a grouping of short stories?”. The stories were just there, and they didn’t entice me. They were just unhitched stories. But as I continued, I began to see the connections methodically woven between the characters, all of which is leading us, the narrators and the reader, to one final moment at the powwow; all of these twelve characters are perfectly interconnected, though they don’t know it as of yet. And as they continue their stories, adding to what we already know, and beginning to converge on Oakland’s Coliseum, the novel takes hold, creating feelings of intense foreboding through Orange’s employ of dramatic irony. The interlude, from which I quoted a particularly stunning section above, floored me, and it was then that I knew, without a doubt, that this novel is a five star read. Orange is matter-of-fact, and he’s hitting on topics that we, as a nation, have fought about for far too long, still attempting to sweep truth under the rug in order to not face the reality of our current world, or who we are, and our sordid history. And while the interlude above is just that, and the narrators barely touch upon what is explicitly stated above–it’s not a novel steeped in politics or in your face–it’s there, calling to the reader, reminding us that privilege exists, that some are luckier than others, and that if we are to survive this harrowing world, we must come together, to understand one another, and to stop the fighting. This novel is fierce.

When There There ended, I was speechless. One, I couldn’t believe Orange left us the way he did, but two, it’s just so unspeakably beautiful, thought-provoking, and intense. Five amazing stars!

I borrowed the audible of this novel from the library, but then purchased my own paperback copy from Amazon, because this powerful novel is a must for my shelves.

“Silence is not just silence but is not speaking up.” There, There is a beautifully written, captivating story of present-day Native Americans living in Oakland, CA. Urban Indians are that generation born in the city. "We’ve been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing…” "Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, completion of a five hundred year old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours.“

The book follows the lives of 12 characters and explores what it means to be an Indian or, perhaps more importantly, feel like an Indian. A formidable look at the life of Native Americans a people affected by dislocation, disjointed identities, fractured families, misinformation, abuse, denial and prejudice yet sustained by culture, tradition and hope. The story line and the characters are eventually drawn into one story when the characters all attend the Big Oakland Powwow. "Here history is celebrated, history is confronted and grieving is renewed." “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.”

This is a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ book.even though I found it frustrating to read in places as there's a lot going on and keeping the stories of all 12 characters straight was a challenge. I read the book on audio and think that it may have been less confusing to have read a paper copy.

I’ll leave you with this one, unnerving, quote: “This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff.

You will never look at Thanksgiving the same way again. *****

There There is a literary fiction novel written by an Indigenous author. Tommy Orange is a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. This book is set in Oakland, California, where the author grew up. As many Indigenous people, Orange grew up off-reservation.

At the prologue, the author lays the foundation to the historical violence and massacre of the Indigenous people - I think the prologue was the best part of this book. In this story we follow twelve different perspectives told by twelve different characters. It discusses the struggles of modern Indians in contemporary society. The reader doesn’t realize at the beginning of the book but the lives of these characters are intertwined by an event that will happen at the end of the story.

The author points out the loss of Native American culture to colonialism and also writes about a variety of themes such as family, death, poverty, ceremony, tradition, addiction, abuse, suicide, and memory. This novel is powerful, insightful, and I believe any book that is able to educate its readers is a book worth reading.

Tommy Orange effectively frames up a narrative that is full of angst, sadness and raw contempt, weaving a series of Native American allegories and historical set pieces that create context for the voices we’re introduced to in the first few chapters. This is a young writer with great potential who almost wrote a great book...

The author, or his characters, are in a sense maimed emotionally, and the prologue attempts to establish this through the use of grotesque imagery of severed hands and heads in whiskey jars and on spikes, haunting reminders of past sins of American settlers which have soaked through the memories of generation after generation like blood through a blanket. It ends up bringing us to present day, or recent history, recounting the Urban Indians born into the modern metropolis with references to recent wars and attempts at assimilation, which are selective of course, representative certainly though of a segment of the population familiar to the writer. In my life I had grown up with Native Americans near Reno Nevada, came to know many of them quite well, and they were not at all as consumed with the melancholy which is richly described throughout his prologue and the book. Nonetheless, it’s a viable narrative and I can hear the passion behind the resentment and contempt, understand the context, but from my perspective it is steeped in a lot of pity, screams of youthful rage.

I was immediately struck by some of the initial passages which I felt were pulled straight out of Wikipedia and then later when the references to “you can find it on the internet” came up, I surmised and later determined through a quick hopping of hyperlinked footnotes that some of the historical pretext looked like it had been carefully paraphrased, in particular the history of Metacomet.

In diving into the characters, beginning with Tony Loneman and then followed by Dean Oxedene, I was really pulled in by the pain of these two characters. The narrative was convincing, the stream of consciousness style is more present in some parts than others and I could hear the voice of the characters distinctly. I did have a little trouble tying the command of erudite references to writers like Gertrude Stein and illustrators like Ralph Steadman to the characters profiles. Some of the passages felt a little inside baseball to me and didn’t fit with the story/

Each of his characters falls back on historical injustices of walls, borders, land and then internalizes them in order to help them, or their characters find meaning by breaking down the notion of those barriers or that property exists as something that is not physical, but is more importantly spiritual. There are many passages that seem to call out injustice over land being taken and yet disregard the very notion of that land as instrumental to what his characters are and symbolize. The walls that he describes that need to come down or are nonexistent precisely because it’s the culture, the feeling of the people, the ethnicity as you will, that is everlasting and connects them to the earth and each other. It is a feeling within those characters and the writer that identity is inextricably linked to our ancestors and their pain, something I can relate to except for the fact that it seems to so dominate their outlook that they are hopelessly defined by that misery. There seems to be no lightheartedness to it all or any of it really.

I’m left with the impression that Tommy Orange has a magnificent command of the English language and code switching but is unable to let go of some very primal instincts that he may eventually gain from through more life experiences. As a youth I felt this same rage and contempt for history, for the sins of my fathers, but later came to understand that life is not as static as I expected and that context was just as important as my gut instincts and the uncontrolled passion that colored my own prejudices. Experience taught me that evil, racism, hatred and contempt was in the heart of every man and every woman of every color and can only be combatted with sobriety, patience and love.

Looking forward to hearing more from this author and seeing whether he evolves or simply digs in to recycled protest lyrics. He definitly has the potential to be one of our great novelists and writers.