Contemporary Authors

• There There ( novel) Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2018

1. There there LCCN 2017038125 Type of material Book Personal name Orange, Tommy, 1982- author. Main title There there / Tommy Orange. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Description 294 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780525520375 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3615.R32 T48 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Penguin Random House - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2156371/tommy-orange

  Tommy Orange is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California, and currently lives in Angels Camp, California.

• Entertainment Weeklly - http://ew.com/books/2018/06/04/tommy-orange-interview/

  QUOTED: "All of them have me in them, and details from my actual life were put into them. There’s the Dean character, who’s trying to do a storytelling project; there are some very real details there. I got a cultural arts grant from the City of Oakland, I went in front of a panel just like he did."
  "I got the grant for two years and I never did the project, except for the fictional version of it, so I thanked them in the acknowledges for never having done what I said I was going to do—but I did do a fictional version of it! And it did help me a lot getting the funding all of those years."

  Meet Tommy Orange, author of the year's most galvanizing debut novel

  Elena Seibert
  placeholder
  DAVID CANFIELD
  June 04, 2018 at 02:00 PM EDT
  If you haven’t heard of Tommy Orange yet, you soon will.

  In a summer season full of anticipated debuts and new voices, Orange still stands out. His novel There There, out Tuesday, has been called “an astonishing literary debut” by Margaret Atwood, and the big praise only begins there. The book is a panorama of contemporary Native American life, a humane epic set in a previously unrepresented segment of Oakland, California. It traces a dozen characters, each on their own personal journeys, before bringing them together for the big Oakland Powwow: a community gathering which wraps up There There‘s many stories in alternately touching and heartbreaking fashion.

  There are other reasons why There There is turning heads: its delicate, rhythmic prose; its detail and specificity; its remarkable prologue, a sweeping, despairing history of Native American life which contrasts sharply with the small, intimate character studies that follow. Yet chiefly, it’s the way Orange brings such an eclectic, nuanced ensemble of a historically marginalized population to life which is eliciting comments like “groundbreaking” and “essential.”

  As to how Orange is feeling about all of this attention: “mixed.” Indeed, the author is hardly used to being in the spotlight in this way — and it’s only just beginning. EW caught up with Orange in a wide-ranging conversation, about his motivation for writing the book, his literary influences (including James Baldwin), and his thoughts on the sheer anticipation that’s met his literary debut. Read on below, and order your copy of There There here.

  ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You didn’t grow up a reader. Why turn to literature, specifically, to tell this story?
  TOMMY ORANGE: I was born and raised in Oakland, but we didn’t exactly grow up around a Native community in Oakland. But there was a number of years where I was working with Native organizations in Oakland, and just came to realize how many stories and how much history there was in the city itself, and cities like it all over the country. I just had a lot of experience in the community.

  With my own background and my dad’s background, I’d fallen in love with reading and writing really late. Right around 2004 or ’05 — I didn’t do well in school or know I wanted to be a writer. I was not a reader. At the end of 2010, this idea popped into my head, and I was convinced by it enough to work on it for the next six years. It was to have all the characters converge at a Powwow in Oakland; have all of their lives converge there. I wasn’t sure exactly of the nature of what was going to happen at the Powwow. I just knew it wasn’t going to be a great thing for everybody involved. After I got the idea, I just found out that I was going to be a father to a son, and I didn’t exactly start working on it right away, because he was born. And I was working a lot then. But the following year, I just started writing into that basic concept. I knew I wanted to write something from a whole bunch of different voices, because I just read stuff that’s done that, that I’ve loved. So having that seed of an idea and then writing into it from all of these different angles was the basic start of the process and writing the novel.

  You’ve said that part of the reason you wrote from so many perspectives is that you come from a voiceless community. Can you expand on that?
  As Native people, growing up, we already don’t see ourselves reflected in movies or literature — or if you do, it’s usually problematic. For Natives growing up in the city, you don’t even see it in other Native art. It’s starting to happen now, but growing up, the representation of Native people who were born and raised in cities — and what those communities looked like — just didn’t happen. I wanted to write into the void of that. I’ve learned enough to know about the Oakland community, and that major cities all over the country had similar communities. There was relocation in the ’50s and ’60s, where massive amounts of Native people moved from reservations to the city. These families go way back, and I’ve known many of them. The voiceless is about not seeing our communities represented anywhere, and wanting to express a range of voices within that community to give an idea of what people are like.

  There’s a real musicality, a rhythm, to this book, and you also come from a musical background. Did that inform your process?
  It’s only something that I’m finding out through others, like you right now. The director of my school helped to copyedit the book, and he was talking about it in terms of musicality, and I’ve heard it a lot since then. But it’s all unconscious influence. I don’t go to sentences in the same way that I approach the piano. (I write compositions for the piano as well.) It’s a totally different process for me, and I feel like that comes from different places. I know that there’s influence there, but it’s certainly not something that I’m trying to do.

  Penguin
  The prologue stands out. What made you decide to start the book on such an ambitious note?
  I’ve always loved what prologues can do, the way they can contextualize. And I also love that they’re optional, so if people don’t want to read them, they can just skip to their first chapter and not miss any part of the story. But I think as native people we have a history of learning bad history — and not only not hearing our stories, but hearing it told wrong. Either it’s covered up or it’s a downright lie about how things went down in American history. To a large extent, the collective American consciousness still buys into somewhat of a heroic past. Wanting to express what it feels like from a Native perspective, going all the way back to when contact first happened — but I wanted to do it in a way that felt contemporary and had voice. Anybody could look up history on the internet or in textbook; I wanted to be able to write about something that was historical in an interesting way, in a way that I feel only novels can do. Creative nonfiction is doing a lot of stuff too, but what I love about what literature can do is how it can convince with the power of the way words are put together.

  You also quote James Baldwin’s comments on the “trap of history.”
  At some point when I was writing at the Indian center in Oakland, I started to understand the concept of historical trauma. Anybody that works in a mental health field and Native communities knows the word now — people don’t even really use it anymore because it’s been overused. Similar to calling Native people resilient, it’s become its own problematic thing. But understanding the concept was an important moment for me, because of the way I’ve seen my dad and myself and other people — the way history affects through the generations, the echoes of violence. Where does the deep sadness come from? Why are people struggling? I wanted that to play out in real characters, in real time — the effects of history, where you start from and what your people did to get you there. It’s all part of what makes a person. I just wanted to make that feel real, by putting it into all these different lives and having them act it out, so to speak.

  Did any of these characters reflect your own experiences?
  All of them have me in them, and details from my actual life were put into them. There’s the Dean character, who’s trying to do a storytelling project; there are some very real details there. I got a cultural arts grant from the City of Oakland, I went in front of a panel just like he did. I got the grant for two years and I never did the project, except for the fictional version of it, so I thanked them in the acknowledges for never having done what I said I was going to do — but I did do a fictional version of it! And it did help me a lot getting the funding all of those years.

  You mentioned this process took six years. For you, writing over that time, what was the emotion and process?
  At the beginning it was pretty exciting, because it felt like I was auditioning voices to see who felt like they had lasting power, and whose voice could really last and made sense together. There were a lot of other characters that did not make the cut, and a lot of different story lines that I just cut out.

  Once I got to the middle and I figured out what I wanted to do, to get everyone to the end, it was pretty tough — to get all of these stories to make sense together. I really wanted to earn the right to call it a novel and not have it just be a collection of linked stories that I’m calling a novel. I wanted to earn the right of everyone sharing an arc and bringing the whole thing together. So the middle was the hardest, and I felt like I had problems in there that I didn’t know how to solve. Lots of despair there in the middle, and struggle. I was going to the MFA program I graduated from at the time, and that helped to not only think about craft, but it helped to be there at the time because I had to be on task. I was turning things in towards an MFA, so it helped to have structure in the middle of it.

  I also realized that going on runs — some of the deeper solutions to the novel and how everything fit together would come to me when I was running, and only then. Running actually became part of my writing process because it became so essential to figuring out some of the deeper solutions to the problems.

  You’ve been positioned as one of the summer’s authors to watch. Are you comfortable with that attention? How do you feel now, talking about the book as it builds buzz, and reflecting on it?
  The feeling is mixed. A writer intends to express something in private for other people to experience in private — not for this level of attention. There’s an irony to succeeding at something that was always supposed to be private, that then becomes super public. I’m not the kind of person that really wants the attention. At the same time, I worked hard on the book and I believe in it, and I’m willing to do anything to support the book and its getting into readers’ hands. There’s a lot of anxiety, with the book tour and all of this publicity and attention — I don’t love all of that. But I want to support the book in the best way that I can. And be grateful toward the publishers who have been amazing; obviously they want me to do whatever it takes to promote the book so that it sells well. It’s a weird thing; there’s no precedent for it in my life, and I’ve never experienced anything like it. I approach it differently all the time.

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/29/tommy-orange-and-the-new-native-renaissance/

  Tommy Orange and the New Native Renaissance
  By Julian Brave Noisecat June 29, 2018
  ARTS & CULTURE

  PHOTO CREDIT: ELENA SEIBERT

  On a June afternoon, Tommy Orange, author of There There, one of this summer’s breakout books, stood at the foot of the stage at the Fellowship of Humanity, a lavender-interiored church on 27th Street in Oakland, California. Behind him, a banner congratulated this year’s graduating class of East Bay Native American high school seniors. It read: “The students of today are the warriors of tomorrow.”

  Orange hates public speaking. With his head buried in his notes, he intoned, “As Native people we have a bad history with schools, with institutions. They’re still teaching history wrong. We still hear them saying: ‘just get over it already,’ even when they’re saying they know the feeling is there. Get over what? The mountain that is history?”

  Orange wore navy Nike high tops, a navy button down shirt to match, acid washed jeans and a black fitted cap with the iconic Port of Oakland crane (inspiration for the imperial walkers in Star Wars) and “The Town” in stylized cursive above its bill. His look, like his words, were authentic to this city—our shared hometown, The Town—in a way that feathers, fringe, beadwork and mystical proclamations just aren’t. Everything about his person was Native to Oakland, troubling assumptions about both those things: Natives and Oakland. “It is an exciting time to be Indigenous,” he said, addressing the graduates. “We need you to help make this world a better place for your little brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, cousins, whether they’re here yet or not.”

  With the release of his acclaimed debut novel—which follows the struggles of Oakland Indians as their lives converge at a local powwow—Orange places himself in the vanguard of what some have described as a “Native Renaissance.” This wave in Native literature includes memoirist Terese Mailhot from the Seabird Island First Nation, who is the New York Times bestselling author of Heart Berries; Billy-Ray Belcourt, a Driftpile Cree poet who just became the youngest-ever winner of the Canadian Griffin Prize for his first book This Wound is a World; and a community of emerging writers schooled in Indigenous movements and educated in institutions like the Santa Fe Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA), where Orange and Mailhot were classmates in the MFA program.

  This new generation is heir to the first “Native Renaissance,” which spanned from the 1960s to 1990s, and included the likes of N. Scott Momaday, whose House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Sherman Alexie, who published his first two collections of poetry in 1992. That first renaissance included many others with a talent for words, like Leslie Marmon Silko, Lee Maracle, Louise Erdrich and Joy Harjo. But those three decades of Indigenous literary proliferation, collaboration and competition ended as many emerging-market booms do: in monopoly. From the 1990s onward, Alexie dominated the Native lit scene, and was elevated by the media to the dubious status of racial spokesman. In a 2017 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Alexie joked that he had been “Indian du jour” for “a very long day.”

  In March, ten women accused Alexie of sexual misconduct that ranged from unwanted advances to harassment, suggesting that patriarchy and old-fashioned exploitation may have played a hand in keeping Alexie atop the American Indian writing world for a quarter century.

  As a Native kid growing up in the 2000s, I was an Alexie fanatic. I emulated his style through high school and beyond, and as a young journalist, I frequently referenced his work. For aspiring Natives-of-letters like me, Alexie was a hero. Through recurring characters like Thomas Builds-The-Fire, Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin, he wrote the junker-littered Spokane reservation to life in gritty detail, spinning Native storylines into critically acclaimed fiction. The downfall of his irreverent voice and tragicomic take on the novel, which came as close as any I ever read to the truth about our Indian condition, felt personal. “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts,” he wrote in the 1996 poem “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” When I read that line for the first time in my senior year high school English class, I underlined it and damn near stood up in my chair to proselytize its genius to my non-Native classmates. I wanted to wield words like Alexie, who could lay waste to a national colonial literature with one sentence.

  But Alexie’s fall also felt necessary. We, the community of Indigenous writers coming up behind him could not rise with him on top. Alexie had grown into an Indigenous super-ego—an authorial autocrat who set the stylistic standards and shaped the careers of the Native writers who toiled, often in obscurity, below him. And as the years wore on, his ironic laugh-and-burn style seemed to settle into a formulaic shtick. Today, Alexie’s portraits of reservation life read more like simulations of rez-y-ness than windows into what our relatives are actually going through. “Hey Victor!” the percussive and oft-repeated-rez-accent-inflected expression of Thomas Builds-The-Fire, the protagonist of Alexie’s Reservation Blues, has become a running inside joke in Indian Country—an Indian “Damn Daniel” or “Bye, Felicia” that took-off in Native subculture before memes were a thing. But translated to the page and screen, Alexie’s exaggerated rez accent never felt true. That was the joke—we laughed because Alexie’s Thomas Builds-The-Fire tried too hard. He was corny.

  The #MeToo movement has done for Native literature what a healthy publishing landscape should have done years ago: it killed Sherman Alexie’s career. For our Indigenous literary and intellectual community to thrive, Alexie’s day needed to end.

  Like their seventies-and-eighties-era pre-Alexie forebears, Orange and his peers have arrived on the scene at a moment of escalating Indigenous activism as witnessed at Standing Rock in 2016. In a cultural moment defined by fear of ecological apocalypse, democratic decline and legitimized white supremacy, newfound interest in Native writers—who speak with the authority of a people who lived through genocide and survived to talk about it—makes sense.

  If one can cite a silver lining coming out of the Trump era, it’s this: a rekindled inclusion imperative. Orange signed with the super-agent Nicole Aragi, whose clients include Edwigde Danticat, Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Safran Foer, just three days after Trump took office. He nearly sold There There to Sarah Jessica Parker for an undisclosed amount in the high-six-figures before taking the novel to auction and landing a deal with Knopf. (When he told me the amount, I exclaimed, “Holy Fuck!”) The New Yorker excerpted a chapter for its March 26th issue under the headline “The State.” The week before the book dropped, the New York Times published a profile of its author.

  Visibility means little without talent, which Orange and his contemporaries have in spades. There There is a work of lyrical panache and structural ambition. Each chapter focuses on a different character. Their lives intertwine through Oakland’s Native and part-Native communities, converging at the fictional “Big Oakland Powwow” at the Oakland Coliseum. Some come to reunite with relatives in song and dance, while a few hustlers plot a grand heist of the powwow’s prize money. There There is like a Native take-off on Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. And when I described it that way to Orange, he agreed: “I love Quentin Tarantino.”

  Many characters are unforgettable. There’s Tony Loneman, a Cheyenne MF Doom fan with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which he calls “The Drome,” who has been recruited by his homies to help with a powwow robbery. Orange pens a devastating description of Loneman in the character’s voice, “My eyes droop like I’m fucked up, like I’m high, and my mouth hangs open all the time. There’s too much space between each of the parts of my face—eyes, nose, mouth, spread out like a drunk slapped it on reaching for another drink.” Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, a veteran of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz, postal worker and rape victim who occasionally taps into her Indian grandmother survival wisdom to protect her family—a real Indigenous superpower if ever there was one—is another standout.

  There are many characters here—too many despite the fact that Orange edited a few out. While reading the book’s grand finale, a heart-pounding series of rapid-fire scenes that jump from one character to the next, I found myself flipping back to earlier chapters to remind myself who was who. But upon further reflection, even that expectation—that you, the reader, will remember each and every one of these Indians—feels like a statement: Remember us. We matter.

  What is perhaps most exciting about Orange and his peers is that they are unafraid to break old molds of theme, style and structure handed down by the earlier generations’ greatest Indian hits. Orange’s book is set in the city, eliding the reservation dispatches that have dominated Native fiction over the decades. Today, more than seven out of ten Native people live in cities. With There There, Native lit is catching-up to demographic reality.

  Orange, Mailhot and Belcourt’s books also bend genres. There There’s prologue, a meditative essay on the terrible symbolic power of Indian-head Americana, is one of its most memorable sections. Mailhot’s hard-hitting Heart Berries is unusually short for a memoir, more poetry than non-fiction. Belcourt’s This Wound is a World is full of references to Indigenous and queer theory and is as much a set of critical theses about our colonial present as it is a collection of poems.

  Circumstances, institutions and relationships have aligned to catalyze a resurgence in the world of Indigenous letters. “The institution of writing has been based in whiteness for so long,” Orange told me. “To have a Native writing program [at IAIA] and to be around a community of Native writers is really amazing.”

  Over lunch, Orange spoke of Mailhot, his close friend and classmate, with admiration. The two exchanged work during their time together at IAIA and sold their books just two weeks apart in February 2017. Mailhot’s memoir, published from Counter Point Press—a tiny independent publisher based in Berkeley—beat the odds to become a bestseller. “She was just like a little bottle rocket that exploded,” Orange said of his friend. Orange also expressed interest in Belcourt’s work, and just got a copy of This Wound is a World.

  “It’s an exciting time to be a Native writer,” Orange told me, riffing on his graduation speech from the night before. Then he finished the last of his pot stickers and hustled off to his next book talk.

  Julian Brave NoiseCat (Secwepemc/St’at’imc) is a writer and organizer based in Washington, D.C. He is a contributing editor for Canadian Geographic and his work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Nation and High Country News.

QUOTED: "Orange's sparkling debut is not merely a literary triumph but a cultural and political one, too. It is a work of defiance and recovery."

Bruised beauty; Native American fiction
The Economist. 428.9099 (July 7, 2018): p68(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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Finding a voice

WHAT does it mean to be an American Indian? The phrase itself is an absurd misnomer. Yet America's natives often prefer it to politer tags--such as Native American--in part because it helps them answer that question. To be an American Indian is not only to descend from the people encountered by European colonisers, in possession of a continent they themselves had settled over 10,000 years before. It is also to be shaped by the calamities that followed: dispossession and genocide, the forcible break-up of families and the mass substance abuse, incarceration and poverty that still blight America's misnamed indigenous people today.

That history creates a paradox with which native intellectuals and cultural revivalists have been wrestling at least since the Indian civil-rights movement of the 1970s. To celebrate Indianness is to meditate on a disaster story; and because that disaster continues, what is there to celebrate? The oral nature of Indian cultures, with their emphasis on folk memory and storytelling, compounds the problem. The culture becomes the calamity; but to abandon the culture entails another kind of loss. Efforts to redefine Indianness as something glorious--as noble-savage Indian, or eco-warrior Indian--cannot distract from that central dilemma for long.

Tommy Orange's fine debut novel, "There There", is in part an examination of this cultural-political quagmire. Set in Oakland, California, its cast of bruised native characters, including drunks, recovering drunks, gangsters and long-suffering grandmothers, are forever questioning and sometimes dabbling in their Indian culture. Much good it does them. A native girl adopted by white parents returns to her roots, only to become a beaten wife on a reservation. A boy who discovers his grandmother's faded tribal costume, and teaches himself to dance in it, ends up gunned down in a pool of blood and feathers. Calamity and Indianness are indeed inseparable, the novel suggests; the droopy features of an Indian child who is born with fetal alcohol syndrome provide an affecting opening image.

This is scarcely overdoing it. Despite recent improvements in the situation of America's roughly 5m native people, they are among the country's poorest, unhealthiest communities. Still, Mr Orange (pictured), a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, represents a powerful counterpoint: a cohort of young native writers and artists who are imbued with the confidence of the cultural revival, but focused more on the lives of modern Indians--most of whom live in cities, not reservations--than on the sundance or sweat lodge. A worthy member of that emerging tradition, Mr Orange offers much more than a tour through the wretchedness he describes.

His characters are deftly sketched rather than deeply worked, but interesting and sympathetic. The small successes of a hardworking postwoman who fosters her wrecked family's children, or of a recovering drunk who defies the mini-bar, appear heroic amid the general failure. And yet they are too wittily handled for easy moralising. To make herself feel better about smoking, the born-again Indian leans on the native rituals she has learned and utters a prayer with every drag of her cigarette. Such writerly panache is the true saving grace of Mr Orange's chronicle.

And given the oral culture he is channelling, that success has a wider significance. A dying protester on Alcatraz, scene of a doomed protest that spawned the Indian civil-rights movement, tells her daughter that the Indian world-view is "just stories, and stories about stories." By that token Mr Orange's sparkling debut is not merely a literary triumph but a cultural and political one, too. It is a work of defiance and recovery.

There There.

By Tommy Orange.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bruised beauty; Native American fiction." The Economist, 7 July 2018, p. 68(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545475410/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=50e67afb. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A545475410

QUOTED: "With his debut novel, There There, Tommy Orange interjects a voice that has been missing from the literary conversation."

'There There' weaves a powerful tale of contemporary urban Native Americans
Joan Gaylord
The Christian Science Monitor. (July 2, 2018): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
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Byline: Joan Gaylord

With his debut novel, There There, Tommy Orange interjects a voice that has been missing from the literary conversation

How do we know it has been missing? Here's a test: If asked to recall the image on an Indian Head nickel, we would reasonably expect that most people could picture the stoic, silent chief staring off to the side. Many would be able to remember the Indian Head test pattern that was widely broadcast each night on American televisions up through the 1970s.

But if asked to picture the lives of contemporary urban Native Americans, might not many readers draw a complete blank? This blindness exists despite the fact that 70 percent of America's indigenous people now live, not on reservations, but in the cities.

It is this void, this lack of cultural awareness that Orange seeks to fill.

A member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations with a master's degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Orange crafts a tale about the interwoven lives of 12 indigenous people living in Oakland, Calif. Each lives a very contemporary American life while wrestling with the effects that their heritage imposes upon their daily experiences.

Orange borrows the title of the book from an observation Gertrude Stein once made about Oakland: "There is no there there." He begins with a searing prologue, a fact-based record that will be unfamiliar to many. In these nine pages, Orange does a reality check on American history, sharing the true accounts of massacres and beheadings, of cultural annihilation and appropriation (sports team mascots, anyone?).

He confronts the sanitized narrative that depicts Indians as the anonymous figures slaughtered by John Wayne in his popular films. He brings to American literature characters that are more realistic though less familiar than the crazy (again, silent) Indian in the classic book "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

And while some readers routinely skip over prologues, to do so this time would be a disservice to the experience of reading "There There." These pages provide a context for the stories that follow, stories that give voices to members of the First Nations. Each life provides a different perspective of what it means to be an Indian in the 21st century.

There are the sisters, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather. Their adult lives continue to be shaped by their childhood experiences as members of the Indian tribes who, accompanying their mother, occupied Alcatraz Island in the late 1960s (another chapter of American history left out of most accounts.)

There is Orvil, the boy who secretly dresses in the Indian regalia he found hidden away at his grandmother's house and learns native dances from watching YouTube videos. He takes pride in his talent as a dancer and struggles to understand why the adults around him say, "it is too risky to do anything Indian."

And also Edwin. Raised by his white mother who has little information to share about his father other than a name, Edwin yearns to know his heritage. He identifies as an Indian while keenly aware that he is half white. His mother's politically correct terminology frustrates him. Turning to the "tribe" that he does know, he takes control of his label: "I use Native, that's what other Native people on Facebook use."

The 12 tales unfold and overlap as each of Orange's characters prepares for the Big Oakland Powwow to be held at the Oakland Coliseum. Halfway through the book, Orange pauses to include an Interlude. Like the Prologue, it provides context. He describes the current interpretation of the traditional powwows and its importance to people too often viewed as anonymous, en masse. Orange shares the many reasons Indians attend, whether to feel a sense of identity or simply to make some money selling their jewelry.

"We made powwows because we needed a place to be together," he writes.

Resuming their stories, Orange brings them all together, including Tony Loneman. With his distinct facial features and impaired abilities, Tony is shaped forever by his mother's drinking. Fetal alcohol syndrome, prevalent in many indigenous communities, is as much a part of his identity as his Cheyenne blood. Tony has his own reasons for attending the powwow, ones that take the story in a direction that is as contemporary, tragic, and American as a breaking news alert.

That might be the point. In this tremendously diverse country, is it not our shared experiences that make us American? Orange simply makes the conversation more authentic.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gaylord, Joan. "'There There' weaves a powerful tale of contemporary urban Native Americans." Christian Science Monitor, 2 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545123644/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=734b78f7. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A545123644

QUOTED: "There There is pithy and pointed. With a literary authority rare in a debut novel, it places Native American voices front and center before readers' eyes."

Pithy And Pointed 'There There' Puts Native American Voices Front And Center
Fresh Air. 2018.
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BYLINE: MAUREEN CORRIGAN

HOST: TERRY GROSS

TERRY GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. A debut novel with an odd title has become one of the first breakout literary novels of the summer. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of "There There."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: Here's the thing about "There There," the debut novel by Native American author Tommy Orange. Even if the rest of its story were just so-so - and it's much more than that - the novel's prologue would make this book worth reading. In that 10-page prologue, Orange wittily and witheringly riffs on some 500 years of native peoples' history, a history of genocide and dislocation presented mostly through the image of heads.

Orange begins with a description of the Indian head test pattern which closed out America's television programming every night during the age of black-and-white TV. He then catapults backwards to 1621, the first Thanksgiving, and then bebops through a litany of Indian massacres in American history. Here's part of that prologue where Orange momentarily catches his breath and sums up.

(Reading) Our heads are on flags, jerseys and coins. Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people - which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation.

In his prologue and in other inspired digressions throughout this novel, Orange's writing reminds me of the late great Tom Wolfe, another exuberant, socially conscious prose poet who loved to get word drunk but never got sloppy. "There There" is distinguished not only by Orange's crackling style but by its unusual subject. This is a novel about urban Indians - about, as he says, native peoples who know the sound of the freeway better than they do rivers, the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete better than they do the smell of cedar or sage. Orange's story takes place in Oakland, Calif. And his title comes from the famous pronouncement about rootlessness that Gertrude Stein made when, as an adult, she revisited Oakland, her childhood home. Stein said, there is no there there. Tommy Orange knows the feeling and the terrain. He also grew up in Oakland and is a member enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. But in "There There," Orange wanted to do something more than fictionalize his own experience.

Instead, his novel is composed of the stories of a bunch of native and mixed-race characters, all of them eventually converging in a climactic scene at a big powwow in the Oakland Coliseum. We readers know from the outset that something terrible will happen at that powwow the minute we meet our first character, a 21-year-old named Tony Loneman who talks about struggles with the Drome, meaning fetal alcohol syndrome. Tony is in with a bunch of lowlifes who've gotten a hold of 3-D plastic guns they're planning to use in a robbery at the powwow.

Other, more benign characters are drawn to the powwow for the same reasons that Americans of every race and ethnicity now log on to sites like ancestry.com - they're searching for identity. That urge is especially strong in characters whose connections to their native heritage is more vexed, like a young woman named Blue, who was adopted at birth by a white couple. She's what Orange calls in his prologue an apple, meaning red on the outside and white on the inside.

The risk with this kind of chorus-line plot structure is that it can feel mechanical, and Orange's novel sometimes does when it stalls in the company of the weaker characters here. But other voices and stories are so alive they more than compensate. Chief among the standouts is a woman named Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, whose background is as singular as her name. As children, Opal and her older sister spent time with their mother on Alcatraz when that island was occupied by Native American activists in 1969. In present time, Opal is now a postal worker caring for her sister's three grandsons.

All of them find themselves at that fateful powwow, which turns out to be as chaotic and idealistic as the Alcatraz occupation and much more violent. In a satiric aside, Orange says that one thing that unites the diverse powwow participants is the type of bumper stickers they've slapped on their cars. They all sport Indian pride messages, like my other vehicle is a war pony and fighting terrorism since 1492. Like those bumper stickers, "There There" is pithy and pointed. With a literary authority rare in a debut novel, it places Native American voices front and center before readers' eyes.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "There There" by Tommy Orange. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, our guest will be David Sanger, author of "The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage And Fear In The Cyber Age." He writes about the Russian hacking of the DNC, digital sabotage from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea and how the U.S. is trying to defend itself. Sanger is a national security correspondent for The New York Times. I hope you'll join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "HAPPY TUNE")

GROSS: Fresh AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRAD MEHLDAU'S "HAPPY TUNE")

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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Pithy And Pointed 'There There' Puts Native American Voices Front And Center." Fresh Air, 18 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543416009/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=71e8f605. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A543416009

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Print Marked Items
Tommy Orange
Library Journal.
143.11 (June 15, 2018): pA95.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Set in Oakland, as its title suggests, Tommy Orange's There There uses coruscating, whipfast language to
delineate the Oakland Native community and the Native experience generally. Throughout, Orange
emphasizes the importance of storytelling, so it's fitting that the book is structured as a series of expertly
linked vignettes moving toward the Big Oakland Powwow. In a phone interview with LJ, Orange explained
what storytelling means to him.
Not a big reader or writer when growing up, Orange became acquainted with the wonders of the story while
working at Oakland's Native American Health Center as well as Story-Center in Berkeley. "I saw the power
of telling personal stories and how transformative it is for both Natives and non-Natives," he explains. From
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and her sister, Jacquie Red Feather, to Jacquie's grandson Orvill, raised by
Opal and desperate to dance at the powwow, to fetal alcohol syndrome-affected Tony, to drug dealers and
powwow committee members and Dene Oxendene, hoping to film interviews with local Natives, the
narrative is richly variegated for a reason.
"There's a monolithic nature to how we think of Native people, a way that's historical and one-dimensional,
and it needs an update," Orange insists. Though the powwow unites different tribes and people into a "really
beautiful" whole, as he describes it, that individuation remains crucial to appreciating a people who have
been rendered mostly invisible in American society. In particular, Orange argues passionately for the
recognition of Natives as a largely urban group, contrary to mythic expectations.
"For at least ten years, 70 percent of Natives have lived in cities," he clarifies,
"and if we aren't getting a real, modern, factual account of this experience, it's another way of
disappearing." Urbanization began with a 1950s effort by the U.S. government to push Natives toward the
cities--"kill the Indian to save the man," explains Orange, who adds that while there remains "infighting
between urban and rez, ultimately we are all in it together, and I wanted to put that part of it on the page."
Asked if non-Natives are surprised to learn that he is city-born and -raised, Orange responds with
understandable bitterness, "I've had the experience of people being surprised to hear that Native people still
exist." Another shocker: people often think that Natives get lots of money from the government and from
casinos. "I don't want to sound like the angry Indian," he says, "but the level of misconception is
overwhelming, and the only way I can exercise my own rage is through literature."
Orange claims that he never felt pressure from himself or others to be the voice of his people, but now he
feels "a retrospective responsibility to help other writers; it will take a lot of us to go from the monolithic to
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polyphonic." Indeed, it must take a lot for these writers even to offer their stories, which as Orange shows
can be "dark and ugly and brutal, and you don't want to put a bow on it." In the book. Opal doesn't want
Orvill to identify with his heritage; as Orange says of his own father, "There was a reticence related to pain.
When you're in survival mode, culture is a privilege."
Yet as Orange declares, "One of the purposes of art is to transform darkness into light, ugliness into beauty.
My experience on Earth has not always been great, but sometimes it has been beautiful, and there are places
of hope and transcendence and joy." As his narrative converges toward the powwow--always his endpoint,
grand yet wrought with the violence that cannot be separated from Native history--Orange limns that joy
and sorrow. He's written a beautiful book.--Barbara Hoffert
June 2018 List
1Paris, B.A. Bring Me Back. St. Martin's. ISBN 9781250151339. $26.99; ebk. ISBN 9781250151353. MYS
See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/pYQy30jWPJ9
2 Orange, Tommy. There There. Knopf. ISBN 9780525520375. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9780525520382. F See
LJ's starred review: ow.ly/rZpL30jWQ5C
3 Backman, Fredrik. Us Against You. Atria. ISBN 9781501160790. $26.99; pap. ISBN 9781982100407.
$18; ebk. ISBN 9781501160813. F See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/jLlX30jWQa9
4 Horowitz, Anthony. The Word Is Murder. Harper. ISBN 9780062676788. $27.99; ebk. ISBN
9780062676818. MYS See LJ's review: ow.ly/Ld0W30jWQew
5 Hillier, Jennifer. Jar of Hearts. Minotaur: St. Martin's. ISBN 9781250154194. $25.99; ebk. ISBN
9781250154217. MYS See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/xQL330jWQhH
6. White, Karen. Dreams of Falling. Berkley. ISBN 9780451488411. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780451488428. F
See LJ's review: 6/1/18
7 Hoang, Helen. The Kiss Quotient. Berkley Jove. ISBN 9780451490803. pap. $15; ebk. ISBN
9780451490810. EROTICA See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/49qb30jWQx0
8 Giffin, Emily. All We Ever Wanted. Ballantine. ISBN 9780399178924. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780399178931.
F See LJ's review: 6/15/18
9 Regan, Katy. Little Big Love. Berkley. ISBN 9780451490346. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780451490360. F See
LJ's starred review: ow.ly/ZAQE30jWQAy
10 Pearson, Allison. How Hard Can It Be. St. Martin's. ISBN 9781250086082. $27.99; ebk. ISBN
9781250086105. F See LJ's starred review: ow.ly/i0nr30jWQOp
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Created by a group of librarians, LibraryReads offers a monthly list of ten current titles culled from
nominations made by librarians nationwide as their favorites. See the June 2018 list at ow.ly/luun30kajQL
and contact libraryreads.org/for-library-staff/to make your own nomination.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tommy Orange." Library Journal, 15 June 2018, p. A95. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542716375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c3abd09c.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542716375

QUOTED: ""I was driving down to LA with my wife, and it just popped into my head all at once. ... I knew I wanted to write a polyphonic novel and have all the characters converge at a shooting at an Oakland powwow. Growing up in Oakland, [I saw] that there were no Native-people-living-in-the-city-type novels. They were all reservation-based. That made me feel isolated. If I was reading about Native experience, it had nothing to do with my experience. So my idea was to have a mix of the contemporary with the traditional."

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Native in the city
Alden Mudge
BookPage.
(June 2018): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
During one of several research forays for his brilliant first novel depicting contemporary experiences of
urban Native Americans, Tommy Orange discovered Gertrude Stein's famously misunderstood quote about
Oakland, California: "There is no there there."
Why was that important?
"She was talking about how the place where she had grown up--Oakland--had changed so much that it was
no longer recognizable," says Orange during a call to his home in Angels Camp, California, not far from
Yosemite Valley. Orange, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, was born and raised in Oakland.
"I didn't immediately know this was going to be the title. But there was so much resonance for Native
people--what this country is now compared to what it was for our ancestors. The parallels just jumped out at
me."
Set in Oakland, There There follows the intersecting lives of 12 contemporary Native Americans as they
prepare for the Big Oakland Powwow. Some, like young Orvil Red Feather, want to connect with Native
traditions. He discovers Indian dance regalia hidden away in the closet of his aunt, Opal Viola Victoria Bear
Shield, a mail carrier who as a child was part of the Native occupation of Alcatraz Island, but who now
"wants nothing to do with anything Indian." Orvil has taught himself to dance by watching videos on
YouTube.
Octavio Gomez, an alienated young Native American, sees the powwow as an opportunity to rob businesses
to pay off drug debts. He is close with his uncle Sixto, who at one point tells him, "We got bad blood in
us.... Some of these wounds get passed down."
And then there is Dene Oxendene, the character who is perhaps closest in experience to Orange himself. A
graffiti artist of mixed heritage, Dene tremulously applies for--and receives--a grant to collect the oral
histories of Oakland's Native people. "I actually got a cultural arts grant from the city of Oakland to do a
storytelling project that never existed but for the fictional version in this novel," Orange admits, laughing.
Orange, who is now 36 and a recent graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA program, did
not grow up reading fiction or wanting to be a writer. He played professional indoor roller hockey until the
sport died out, and he has a degree in sound engineering. "There weren't many job prospects," he says.
"People with stars in their eyes who wanted to end up in big studios had to be willing to fetch coffee and
clean toilets, so we were told."
So Orange got a job at a used bookstore. "At the time, I was reading to find meaning," he says. "I was raised
religiously, Christian evangelical. My dad was into the Native American Church, which is the peyote
church. Both of my parents were intensely into God. But none of that was for me. I was reading to figure
out what it all did mean to me. I found fiction first through Borges and Kafka. I was actually eating a
doughnut on a break, reading A Confederacy of Dunces, when I realized what a novel could do. In that
singular moment, I became obsessed. Once I knew what a novel could do, I wanted to do it."
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Orange first imagined There There around the time he and his wife, a psychotherapist whom he met when
they were both working at Oakland's Native American Health Center, conceived their now-7-year-old son.
"I was driving down to LA with my wife, and it just popped into my head all at once," Orange says. "I knew
I wanted to write a polyphonic novel and have all the characters converge at a shooting at an Oakland
powwow. Growing up in Oakland, [I saw] that there were no Native-people-living-in-the-city-type novels.
They were all reservation-based. That made me feel isolated. If I was reading about Native experience, it
had nothing to do with my experience. So my idea was to have a mix of the contemporary with the
traditional, an urban feel, with echoes of violence and the continuation of violence in Native communities."
One of the animating questions for all the novel's characters is what being Native American means today.
Orvil, for example, alienated from his heritage, anxiously Googles, "What does it mean to be a real Indian?"
"For a long time," Orange says, "a real Indian meant someone who does not exist anymore. We're going
through a period right now as a people, wondering--because there are 575 recognized tribes, each with its
own language and way of thinking--are we doing harm against Indian identity by talking about us as one
people? But at the same time, we're probably more alike than we are different."
Which is why the idea of powwows is so symbolic for Orange. He didn't grow up going to powwows. But
later in life, he was on the Oakland powwow committee. "The reason it works so well for Native people
living in the city is that it is intertribal. All these tribes come together to do one thing together. It's a
marketplace, but it's also where we see each other as Native people. It's an intensely visible, communal
space, with people coming together, dancing and singing the old ways."
Orange says it was very important for There There, a novel with many characters and voices, to be a
readable book. "It's an elusive thing," he says. "Native people, I think, have a skeptical view of history, the
way it's taught and the way it's understood by the average American. There's a certain burden to inform
correctly. I wanted to find a way to portray the way Natives experience history. And I wanted to find a way
to do it in a compelling and, again, readable way."
In There There, Orange has succeeded in doing just that. It's a compelling read, a stunning tour de force and
a display of Orange's impressive virtuosity.
INTERVIEW BY ALDEN MUDGE
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Mudge, Alden. "Native in the city." BookPage, June 2018, p. 18. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540052001/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=87733a8a.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540052001

QUOTED: "In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself."

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Orange, Tommy: THERE THERE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Orange, Tommy THERE THERE Knopf (Adult Fiction) $25.95 6, 5 ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Orange's debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through
the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching
YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body--these are just a few of the point-of-view characters
in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow.
Orange, who grew up in the East Bay, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather,
it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many
outside of it. "We made powwows because we needed a place to be together," he writes. "Something
intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry,
our songs, our dances, our drum." The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that's part of
its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For
Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time,, there is nothing as
conditional as sobriety: "She was sober again," Orange tells us, "and ten days is the same as a year when
you want to drink all the time." For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline
is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called
"Urban Indians," the novel recalls David Treuer's The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own.
What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don't share a single identity; theirs is a
multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to
the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel's stunning, brutal
denouement. "People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them," James Baldwin wrote in a line
Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book's sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual
here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native
Americans, but also of America itself.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Orange, Tommy: THERE THERE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700556/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b578f17.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700556
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NATIVE SON: Novelist Tommy Orange
highlights a group of urbanites we seldom
hear about
Maddie Oatman
Mother Jones.
43.3 (May-June 2018): p64+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Foundation for National Progress
http://www.motherjones.com
Full Text:
IN 1935, WHEN GERTRUDE STEIN returned to Oakland, California, for the first time in decades, she
stopped by her childhood home to find the big house and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge she
remembered all gone. "There is no there there," she later wrote in Everybody's Autobiography, a phrase for
which she (and, unfairly, Oakland itself) would long be remembered.
Author Tommy Orange uses Stein's words to evoke a different sort of erasure in There There, his debut
novel, out in June. The book's 12 main characters, like its 36-year-old author, are Native American--their
ancestral land, one reminisces, buried in "glass and concrete and wire and steel, unretumable covered
memory." Their stories, which become ever more tightly braided as the book moves toward its explosive
finale (at a powwow in a football stadium), are those of contemporary Oaklanders--postal workers and
custodians and high schoolers who are fighting "to be a present-tense people."
Some 70 percent of the country's roughly 5 million Native Americans are now city dwellers. Yet the urban
Native experience had never been portrayed in literature, "as far as I could tell," Orange says as I we walk
around Oakland's Lake Merritt. That, coupled with his "raw virtuosic talent" (as novelist Claire Vaye
Watkins puts it in her cover blurb), sparked a bidding war among publishers who hoped to end the drought
of major books from Native American writers. Sherman Alexie, who first made waves with his 1993 story
collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in 4 Heaven, lamented this "fallow period" during a Fresh
Air interview last year. After reading one chapter of Orange's book, he emailed his writer friends to say, "It's
here. That book I've been waiting for." Orange, who calls himself a "timid, shy guy," has deep brown eyes
and a smattering of freckles. His white mother comes from a longtime Bay Area family. His father, raised in
Oklahoma, is a member of the state's Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Dad is a "walking stereotype," Orange
says. He has long hair, and when they were growing up he made his children listen to "peyote tapes"--
recordings of Native American Church songs Orange only later came to love. Orange remembers "a lot of
fighting at home" as his parents' marriage dissolved, and brawling in high school with kids who called him
Chinese. After getting a college degree in sound engineering, he couldn't find relevant work, so he took a
gig at a used bookstore in San Leandro. That's when "I fell head over heels" for literature, he says, starting
with Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges. "I always felt like I was playing catch-up, so I got obsessive about
how much reading and writing I was doing."
It was around the same time that Orange began opening his eyes to his heritage. He spent eight years
working on and off at Oakland's Native American Health Center, eventually creating a media lab there.
When his dad was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma and decided to treat it with traditional Native healing
methods, Orange joined him in New Mexico for the ceremonies. "That was the turning point for me,"
Orange says. "I learned about who I am and what I come from." (His father, he adds, is alive and cancerfree.)
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The concept for There There came along in 2010, as Orange was driving down to Los Angeles for a
concert. He'd just learned his wife was pregnant, and he was thinking it was time to get serious with his
writing. And then I "the thing just popped into my head; the whole thing felt right there," he recalls, curling
his wide hand into a fist. "It was somehow getting everybody to this powwow." He spent the next six years
honing his characters, including Thomas Frank, a bumbling janitor whose "one thousand percent Indian"
father was modeled on Orange's dad, and Orvil Red Feather, who secretly dons his grandmother's tribal
regalia to practice TV dance moves in the mirror.
In 2014, Orange enrolled in an mfa program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, a first-of-its-kind writing course whose instructors are mostly of indigenous descent; he teaches
there now. His thesis reader, Pam Houston, author of the story collection Cowboys Are My Weakness,
describes Orange as "more than a good student--he's a deeply soulful man who makes everyone around him
want to try harder, do better, without him seeming to say or do anything at all." Classmates included Terese
Mailhot, whose lauded 2018 memoir, Heart Berries, sold within weeks of There There.
After a stop for lunch near the lake, Orange leads me to an old haunt, the Intertribal Friendship House, one
of the first community centers geared toward urban Native Americans. We're greeted by 22-year-old
program manager Javier Patty, who, with Orange's mentoring, edited a film about relocation. Patty, a
member of the Muscogee Creek and Seminole tribes, tells me he dreams of working at Google as he shows
me a greenhouse where the nonprofit grows onions and cabbage used for food events, such as an upcoming
"precolonial" dinner.
Orange sits down with the center's director, Carol Wahpepah, with whom he keeps in touch. She asks for
photos of his six-year-old son. He then presents her with an early UK edition of There There, whose cover
depicts a painted feather surrounded by a pattern of droplets. "Carol, let me tell you what they tried to get
on here--a headdress!" Orange says.
"Oh, no!" she says. They shake their heads and laugh.
"It was really sweet to be able to hand-deliver my book to Carol," Orange tells me as we make our way
back toward the lake. There There is fiction, but he sees it as filling a blank in the historical ledger. "I'm
super happy I can at least be one voice saying, 'No, but wait--there's this, too.'"
THE ART OF WAR
It's hard to convince Americans to care about war in a faraway land, which is what makes Brothers of the
Cun so remarkable. Out May 15, this brave, honest memoir by Marwan Hisham, who comes of age as his
Syrian homeland descends into chaos, is made all the more relatable by collaborator Molly Crabapple,
whose ink illustrations imbue Hisham's story with a deeper sense of urgency--and heartbreak.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Oatman, Maddie. "NATIVE SON: Novelist Tommy Orange highlights a group of urbanites we seldom hear
about." Mother Jones, May-June 2018, p. 64+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536988384/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3c140e03.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536988384
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There There
Publishers Weekly.
265.14 (Apr. 2, 2018): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* There There
Tommy Orange. Knopf, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-525-52037-5
Orange's commanding debut chronicles contemporary Native Americans in Oakland, as their lives collide in
the days leading up to the city's inaugural Big Oakland Powwow. Bouncing between voices and points of
view, Orange introduces 12 characters, their plotlines hinging on things like 3-D-printed handguns and VRcontrolled
drones. Tony Loneman and Octavio Gomez see the powwow as an opportunity to pay off drug
debts via a brazen robbery. Others, like Edwin Black and Orvil Red Feather, view the gathering as a way to
connect with ancestry and, in Edwin's case, to meet his father for the first time. Blue, who was given up for
adoption, travels to Oklahoma in an attempt to learn about her family, only to return to Oakland as the
powwow's coordinator. Orvil's grandmother, Jacquie, who abandoned her family years earlier, reappears in
the city with powwow emcee Harvey, whom she briefly dated when the duo lived on Alcatraz Island as
adolescents. Time and again, the city is a magnet for these individuals. The propulsion of both the overall
narrative and its players are breathtaking as Orange unpacks how decisions of the past mold the present,
resulting in a haunting and gripping story. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi Inc. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"There There." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 42. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=75d84553.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533555589

QUOTED: "Engrossing at its most granular, in characters' thoughts and fleeting moments, There There introduces an exciting voice."

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There There
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
114.17 (May 1, 2018): p64.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* There There.
By Tommy Orange.
June 2018. 304p. Knopf, $25.95 (9780525520375).
The at-first disconnected characters from whose perspectives Orange voices his symphonic debut are united
by the upcoming Big Oakland Powwow. Some have been working on the event for months; some will sneak
in with only good intentions, while others are plotting to steal the sizable cash prizes. Creative interludes
from an omniscient narrator describe, for example, the names of First Nations people or what it means to be
an Urban Indian: "We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has
never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere." Opal recalls occupying
Alcatraz as a child with her family; today she raises her sister's grandchildren as her own after their
unspeakable loss. With grant support, Dene endeavors to complete the oral-history project his deceased
uncle couldn't, recording the stories of Indians living in Oakland. In his thirties, with his white mother's
blessing, Edwin reaches out to the Native father he never met. While anticipation of the powwow provides a
baseline of suspense, the path Orange lights through these and his novel's many other stories thrills on its
own. Engrossing at its most granular, in characters' thoughts and fleeting moments, There There introduces
an exciting voice.--Annie Bostrom
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bostrom, Annie. "There There." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 64. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647389/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b4f4a83d.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539647389
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Tommy Orange whose debut novel, There
There, was published in June by Knopf
Poets & Writers Magazine.
46.4 (July-August 2018): p50+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Poets & Writers, Inc.
http://www.pw.org/magazine
Full Text:
INTRODUCED BY Claire Vaye Watkins author of two books, including the novel Gold Fame Citrus,
published by Riverhead Books in 2015.
The first thing one notices about There There, Tommy Orange's debut novel, is its voice, or rather its voices.
Orange is also a composer, which will come as no surprise to anyone who reads this symphony of a novel.
Orange's book sings of urban Indians across Oakland, California, and across time, so that the howitzers
mowing down Cheyenne and Arapaho at the Sand Creek Massacre rhyme with the 3-D printed guns a
scrum of boys plans to use to rob a powwow. The novel defies tidy symmetry and comforting binaries such
as past and present, Native and not. Structurally, Orange's musical prose is refracted and refrained as if
through a kaleidoscope. Or maybe it's a spider web, one of the novel's motifs, which one character calls
"both home and trap." Orange's polyphonic web stretches from Oakland into Indian country beyond, to "a
peyote commune named Morning Star" in Taos, New Mexico, and a substance abuse conference in
Albuquerque, where a woman comes face-to-face with her rapist at an AA meeting. Together Orange's
unforgettable characters embark on a collective and heroic journey unlike any I have ever read.
Orange writes the way the best rappers rap, the way the finest taggers tag. His is a bold aesthetic of
exhilaration and, yes, rage. As Solange Knowles might put it, his characters have got a lot to be mad about.
Many are broken, grieving, sick, shell-shocked, or otherwise lost. Yet in these pages they dance together in
defiance of Indians as the white settler imagination would have them: "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."
Tommy Orange was born and raised in Oakland, California. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and
Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts
(IAIA), where he received his own MFA in 2016. He lives in Angels Camp, California, with his wife and
son.
Tell me about your writing process.
My writing process changed several times during the six years it took to write this book. At the beginning I
was working full-time and was a new father, so I woke up before my son to write before I had to go to
work, then stayed up late writing after he was asleep. My wife was a big part of this equation of course. At
some point along the way I realized that going for long runs often gave me solutions to some of the deeper
problems I was having with the novel and making all of these characters, their individual lives and
trajectories, work together as a whole.
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After getting my son off to school, I'll play piano, which is a pretty nonverbal yet creative space and always
does something important for me. Then I'll work on the floor in my son's room: I often write lying down,
something I've heard referred to as supine writing. Then at some point I'll run, then go work at a coffee shop
before having to pick my son up from school. My wife puts him to sleep at his bedtime when we can make
that happen, and I'll usually get back to work.
The structure of this book is stunning. I know you studied with Pam Houston, a master teacher of form and
a master of form in her own work. With so many moving parts, how did you find the right shape for this
story?
I knew I wanted to write something with converging character arcs from the very beginning. I didn't realize
how hard it would get. In the middle of writing it I was a complete mess, and so was the book. That was
about the point I started the MFA program at IAIA. Having a structure and accountability and someone
reading and giving feedback on the other side helped me get out of what Eden Robinson described--she's on
the faculty at the school--when she said, "Oh, you must be in the muddy middle." And it was true. Pam was
a big help during my time there. Finding the right shape was related to running and having deeper, more
complex solutions sort of just coming to me--I'd slow to a jog and write things down in my notes on my
phone.
You're very modest and would never bring this up, but I know that you were in the enviable position of
having many publishing houses bid on this novel. How did you decide which house was the best fit for you?
I'd been told by teachers in my MFA program regarding possible agents that what you should look for is
someone who believes in your work, someone who loves it, in a clear way, almost like you would hope a
husband or wife loves you, with a kind of complete or unquestioning love. Not that they wouldn't have
suggestions to help make the work better. I also looked up all the editors in the running, and Karen Russell
said getting Jordan Pavlin as an editor was like winning the lottery. I feel the same way. And Jordan also
happened to be the person I felt was most interested in my manuscript, on behalf of Knopf.
You received your MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, where you are now a faculty member.
Is the MFA path one you would recommend? What advice would you give to an aspiring writer longing for
community?
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I was resistant to the MFA path because I came to reading on my own and knew that writers had been
writing books for way longer without MFAs than they had with. But this program is special because it's a
Native writing community. It can already be pretty lonely just being a Native person, and also a writer. So to
find community was important to me. To not feel alone was a big reason I fell in love with books. I'm never
alone if I have a book. Now I'd say do your research and find an MFA that fits what you want; there are so
many great ones now. I think it's a good way to get access to people, teachers, who also have access to
agents and editors and just how the whole thing works because they've published books.
Agent: Nicole Aragi
Editor: Jordan Pavlin
First printing: 55,000
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Tommy Orange whose debut novel, There There, was published in June by Knopf." Poets & Writers
Magazine, vol. 46, no. 4, 2018, p. 50+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542576408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c1fdbeaa.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542576408

"Bruised beauty; Native American fiction." The Economist, 7 July 2018, p. 68(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545475410/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=50e67afb. Accessed 15 July 2018. Gaylord, Joan. "'There There' weaves a powerful tale of contemporary urban Native Americans." Christian Science Monitor, 2 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545123644/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=734b78f7. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Pithy And Pointed 'There There' Puts Native American Voices Front And Center." Fresh Air, 18 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543416009/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=71e8f605. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Tommy Orange." Library Journal, 15 June 2018, p. A95. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542716375/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Mudge, Alden. "Native in the city." BookPage, June 2018, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540052001/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Orange, Tommy: THERE THERE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700556/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Oatman, Maddie. "NATIVE SON: Novelist Tommy Orange highlights a group of urbanites we seldom hear about." Mother Jones, May-June 2018, p. 64+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536988384/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "There There." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 42. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Bostrom, Annie. "There There." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 64. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647389/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Tommy Orange whose debut novel, There There, was published in June by Knopf." Poets & Writers Magazine, vol. 46, no. 4, 2018, p. 50+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542576408/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/what-does-it-mean-to-be-native-american-a-new-novel-offers-a-bracing-answer/2018/05/29/a508d0ba-6289-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?utm_term=.0b94894058d8
  Word count: 1031

  What does it mean to be Native American? A new novel offers a bracing answer.
  By Ron Charles
  May 29
  Email the author
  Toward the end of Tommy Orange’s devastating debut novel, a 4-year-old Native American boy keeps asking his grandma: “What are we? What are we?”

  (Knopf)
  The boy has no way of knowing, but that’s a blood-soaked question that Western invaders have made Indians ask themselves for centuries. Exiled, dispersed, murdered, robbed, mocked, appropriated and erased, Native Americans have been forced to define themselves amid unrelenting assault. Their survival, their failure and their resilience in modern-day America are the subjects of “There There,” this complex knot of a novel by a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

  Everything about “There There” acknowledges a brutal legacy of subjugation — and shatters it. Even the book’s challenging structure is a performance of determined resistance. This is a work of fiction, but Orange opens with a white-hot essay. With the glide of a masterful stand-up comic and the depth of a seasoned historian, Orange rifles through our national storehouse of atrocities and slurs, alluding to figures from Col. John Chivington to John Wayne. References that initially seem disjointed soon twine into a rope on which the beads of American hatred are strung. (Whoever is editing this year’s collection of “The Best American Essays,” please don’t pass over this prologue just because it’s in a novel.)

  The story that follows comes to us in short, intense chapters that focus on different members of a large cast of Indians around Oakland, Calif. Some of these people speak to us directly; others are described in the third person, forming a collection of diverse approaches that may remind readers of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

  [Louise Erdrich’s ‘LaRose’: A gun accident sets off a masterly tale of grief and love]

  Alcoholism, unemployment and depression conspire to thwart most of these characters’ lives. In varying degrees, their vague sense of ethnic pride is infected by a toxic germ of shame. There’s a young man born with fetal alcohol syndrome whose mother is in jail. Another man, “ambiguously nonwhite,” has won a grant to record the life stories of “Urban Indians,” asking each of them, “What does being Indian mean to you?” A third young man, overweight and constipated, has a graduate degree in Native American literature but no job prospects — a living symbol of the moribund plight of Indian culture in the United States.

  One chapter, which appeared earlier this year in the New Yorker, is told in the second person and describes Thomas, an alcoholic who recently lost his job as a janitor. “One of these big, lumbering Indians,” Thomas feels permanently suspended between the world of his white mother and the world of his medicine-man dad who “is one-thousand-percent Indian.” “You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust,” the narrator says. “You were both and neither. When you took baths, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together in the same body.” But despite that incurable confusion, Thomas feels a constant drumbeat, an irresistible rhythm that pounds into him a longing for his Native heritage: “You should probably have done something else with your fingers and toes than tap, with your mind and time than knock at all the surfaces in your life like you were looking for a way in.”

  Author Tommy Orange (Elena Seibert)
  Orange makes little concession to distracted readers, but as the number of characters continues to grow — a trio of brothers, a postal worker, a girl who moves to Alcatraz with her family — we begin to grasp the web of connections between these people. And eventually their lives coalesce around an upcoming powwow in the Oakland Coliseum. But they have vastly different expectations for the celebration. For some, the powwow is an opportunity to honor a history they treasure; for others, it’s a chance to discover a heritage they know almost nothing about. And for a small band of thugs, it’s the perfect setup for a robbery.

  The variety of their responses to the powwow — some deeply spiritual, others wholly amoral — demonstrates the diversity of a group of people too often lumped together under a wooden stereotype. But in almost every story, Orange notes a striving for self-knowledge, a secret desire to see oneself. Again and again, the characters study their faces in a mirror or a video or some passing reflective surface, hoping to perceive something beyond the image of uselessness and irrelevance that a racist nation insists upon.

  In the most poignant instance, a 14-year-old boy named Orvil Red Feather sneaks into the bedroom of his grandmother, Opal, and puts on traditional Indian clothes. He’s thrilled but somehow disoriented, too, by seeing himself as an Indian dressed up like an Indian. “It isn’t backwards,” Orange writes, “and actually he doesn’t know what he did wrong, but it’s off. He moves in front of the mirror and his feathers shake. He catches the hesitation, the worry in his eyes, there in the mirror. He worries suddenly that Opal might come into the room, where Orvil is doing . . . what? There would be too much to explain.”

  As these individual stories intersect, the plot accelerates until the novel explodes in a terrifying mess of violence. Technically, it’s a dazzling, cinematic climax played out in quick-cut, rotating points of view. But its greater impact is emotional: a final, sorrowful demonstration of the pathological effects of centuries of abuse and degradation.

  Ron Charles is the editor of Book World and host of TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com. On Monday, June 25 at 7 p.m., Tommy Orange will be at Politics and Prose at The Wharf, 70 District Square SW, Washington.

  Read more:

  David Treuer: Burning Wooden Indians

  THERE THERE
  By Tommy Orange

  Knopf. 304 pp. $25.95

• Globe and Mail
  https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/reviews/article-review-tommy-oranges-stunning-debut-novel-there-there/
  Word count: 1231

  QUOTED: "Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, should probably be on reading lists for every creative writing program in this country. It is a master class in style, form and narrative voice. Orange, who is from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, utilizes first, second and third-person narration to incredible effect, creating a multi-voiced novel that effectively reflects an entire community."

  Review: Tommy Orange’s stunning debut novel There There
  ALICIA ELLIOTT
  SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
  PUBLISHED JUNE 5, 2018
  UPDATED JUNE 5, 2018
  Open this photo in gallery
  Let’s get this out of the way: Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, should probably be on reading lists for every creative writing program in this country. It is a master class in style, form and narrative voice. Orange, who is from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, utilizes first, second and third-person narration to incredible effect, creating a multi-voiced novel that effectively reflects an entire community, much like other urban Indigenous books such as Katherena Vermette’s The Break or Erika T. Wurth’s recent Buckskin Cocaine.

  And unlike some male authors who think of their female characters as mere conduits for male desires or projections, Orange’s are rich and complex. The best section of the book revolves around a character named Blue. When she describes her decision to stay with her abusive boyfriend, there is no judgment of her choice, only heartbreaking empathy: “After the first time, and the second, after I stopped counting, I stayed and kept staying. I slept in the same bed with him, got up for work every morning like it was nothing. I’d been gone since the first time he laid hands on me.”

  Despite the novel’s strengths, a strange thing happened as I read There There. I started thinking about the concept of double consciousness. First introduced by W.E.B. Dubois in 1903, double consciousness refers to the way that Black Americans are forced to divide their identity in two while living in a racist society: They must see themselves both as Black people, and, separately, as Americans. As a result, Black Americans are forced to always be conscious of themselves as white Americans see them, which is not necessarily the way that they see themselves or one another.

  Open this photo in gallery
  Tommy Orange, the author of “There There,” at the Indian American Institute of Art in Santa Fe, N.M., where he teaches, May 17, 2018 (Christopher Thompson/The New York Times)

  CHRISTOPHER D. THOMPSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

  While this is a specific term with a specific history for Black Americans, as a Tuscarora woman, I think the idea of a double consciousness rings true to many racialized people. We must always be aware of the ways that we get stereotyped by others, how our actions may feed into those stereotypes and how our identities as racialized people seem constantly at odds with our identities as citizens of a nation that has been built on our oppression.

  I bring this up because, while I was reading Orange’s novel, I found myself wondering how non-Indigenous people would read this book and whether they would interpret it to reinforce their stereotypes of Indigenous people. This unease started in the incredibly well-written prologue, which makes a compelling case for urban Indigenous peoples’ connection to cities: “We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete… better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread…”

  But then Orange ends this lovely passage with these rather suspect lines: “Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

  We are living in a political climate in which Conservative pundits have held up Tomson Highway’s words about his time in residential schools to deligitimize the entire Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. As I read these last two lines in Orange’s novel, I couldn’t help but worry about how these words could be similarly weaponized to delegitimize land claims. “After all,” the imaginary op-eds read, “if the land is, indeed, everywhere, why does it matter if pipelines are built through them? Why does Indigenous title matter? The land is everywhere regardless.” This is what it felt like for me, as an Indigenous woman, reading this Indigenous work with double consciousness playing out in the background.

  There are other such moments in Orange’s book. The climax of the book is a moment of violence enacted in the one place that many Indigenous people see as a space they can safely, unapologetically be themselves: a pow-wow. As a reader whose family gatherings revolve around my community’s local pow-wow every year, it was particularly difficult to see this setting used as the backdrop for such violence, especially considering young Indigenous men are the ones who ultimately enact it. Will non-Indigenous readers see this scene as evidence that we’re dysfunctional? That our men are inherently violent? That our peoples’ problems are all our faults?

  That said, Orange’s novel does not let colonization off easy. Far from it. In the same vein as Vermette’s The Break, Orange starts his multi-character novel by historically setting the stage for readers, describing in devastating, unsparing prose the Sand Creek massacre, as well as the history of Indigenous people’s heads being used as iconography: “Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people—which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, is now out of circulation.” Whenever Orange sets his sights on colonialism and racism, his criticism is sharp and unrelenting.

  But that double consciousness lingered for me. Indigenous writers should be able to write about their people in whatever ways feel true to them, having their characters live or die as feels appropriate and necessary for the story they want to tell. Racism puts racialized writers in a curious predicament: they must choose between telling the story they want to tell and censoring their work for the sake of how others outside their community will read it. I highly doubt, for example, that Alice Munro has had to worry that writing a story about white people dying could reinforce stereotypes about white people.

  While none of this takes away from the craft, beauty and power of Orange’s novel, it does make me wonder whether some non-Indigenous readers will love this book because it’s an effective, masterful execution of his singular vision. Or will they love it because they can selectively use parts of it to reinforce problematic ideas about Indigenous peoples that they already held? For the sake of Orange’s stunning novel, I certainly hope it’s the former.

  Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations, currently living in Brantford, Ontario, and author of the forthcoming book A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.

• Vox
  https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/7/2/17514954/there-there-tommy-orange-review
  Word count: 793

  QUOTED: "Orange’s crisp, elegant sentences keep things moving unobtrusively, but his greatest strength is his ability to mimic the rhythms of speech without becoming so gimmicky as to be grating."
  "This is a trim and powerful book, a careful exploration of identity and meaning in a world that makes it hard to define either. Go ahead and go there there."

  Tommy Orange’s There There is the novel of the summer
  There There is a searing examination of American Indianness in the 21st century
  By Constance Grady@constancegrady Jul 2, 2018, 9:20am EDT
  SHARE

  Knopf
  If there’s a novel of the summer this year, it’s Tommy Orange’s There There.

  “Have you read There There yet?” I was asked at a publishing party.

  I confessed that I had not.

  “So she’s not there there yet,” one of the publishers concluded. “But I’m there there.”

  “Is it that good?” another one asked.

  “It’s so good,” the first confirmed.

  “Yes, Tommy Orange’s New Novel Really Is That Good,” says the New York Times headline, in an echo of its famous Hamilton review.

  Reader, I must confirm: There There really is an extremely good book.

  There There is a novel about American Indians in Oakland, California: “Urban Indians,” Orange writes, who “came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest.”

  Orange takes on the voice of a different character in each chapter. And his characters dance in and out of one another’s lives with relationships so complex you’ll want to chart them — Edwin from chapter four is working with Blue from chapter 17 who is the daughter of Jaquie from chapter 10 who is the sister of Opal from chapter three — but all of them converge at a single point: the upcoming Oakland powwow.

  For everyone involved, the powwow is a shifty, ambivalent avatar of Indianness, an identity that many of these characters feel themselves to be playing at. In 21st-century America, the concept of “Indian” is so often treated as an anachronism (a reminder of a people tragically slaughtered, with remnants of the population on reservations) rather than as an identity held by living human beings, that it’s difficult for Orange’s characters to find a way to think of themselves as authentic Indians.

  Rating

  “I’m as Native as Obama is black,” says Edwin, who has a white mother and grew up without meeting his American Indian father. “It’s different though. For Natives. I know. I don’t know how to be. Every possible way I think that it might look for me to say I’m Native seems wrong.”

  Orvil, meanwhile, is American Indian on both sides but grew up without learning about this heritage, so he gets it all from YouTube. When he puts on tribal regalia and looks at the mirror, he appears to himself as “dressed up like an Indian.” That’s the only way that he knows to be Indian, writes Orange: “It’s important that he dress like an Indian, dance like an Indian, even if it is an act, even if he feels like a fraud the whole time, because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.”

  As Orange’s characters attempt to reconcile themselves to their shifting sense of their identities, tragedy lurks in the background. At the opening of the novel we met Tony, a kid with fetal alcohol syndrome (he calls it the Drome) who’s mixed up with some petty criminals, a gun, and plans for a robbery at the powwow. You know that as soon as everyone finally gets there — to the place where they are supposed to be truly and authentically Indian, as best they can figure out what it means — something terrible is going to happen.

  Orange’s crisp, elegant sentences keep things moving unobtrusively, but his greatest strength is his ability to mimic the rhythms of speech without becoming so gimmicky as to be grating. Each character in this novel has a distinct narrative voice, but there’s a unified flow from chapter to chapter; it can sweep you along.

  This is a trim and powerful book, a careful exploration of identity and meaning in a world that makes it hard to define either. Go ahead and go there there.

• San Francisco Chronicle
  https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/There-There-by-Tommy-Orange-12974292.php
  Word count: 1088

  ‘There There,’ by Tommy Orange
  By Chelsea Leu
  June 7, 2018 Updated: June 7, 2018 4:53 p.m.
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  Tommy Orange talks about his debut novel "There There" at Lake Merritt on Tuesday, May 29, 2018 in San Francisco, Calif. "There There" is a multi-generational portrait of urban Native American life which takes ...Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle
  Beyond outmoded tales about cowboys and manifest destiny, most of the stories we tell about American Indians are misty romances of a bygone people living in harmony with the land. Or they’re all about the destruction of that ideal, the tragic sidelining of a defeated race. In short, as Tommy Orange notes with exasperation and fury and grim humor in his exceptional debut novel “There There,” there’s a pronounced dearth of imagination when it comes to telling stories about native people who are very much alive.

  Perhaps because of this lack, “There There” overflows with narrative threads. The novel is told in short episodic bursts, inhabiting by turns the lives and minds of 13 people with ties to Oakland’s native community as they gather and prepare for the Big Oakland Powwow. One gets the sense that Orange, having boldly declared his intention to tell the story of urban Indians in his prologue, is wisely trying to make room for everyone.

  Because none of his characters, it’s clear, has a monopoly on Indianness. Instead, as with anything as fraught as identity, “Indianness” is mediated and deeply confusing. Fourteen-year-old Orvil Red Feather turns to Google, that fount of answers, to ask, “What does it mean to be a real Indian,” and he and his brothers sneak to the Powwow out of a curiosity sprung from their native grandmother’s unwillingness to let them do anything Indian. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means,” she tells Orvil. “Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen.” Edwin Black only finds his native father in his 30s, via Facebook message. Half-white, half-Indian Thomas Frank struggles to reconcile both sides of who he is: “You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken.” And Calvin Johnson admits that he feels guilty even saying he’s native — “Mostly I just feel like I’m from Oakland.” But that ambivalence, Orange seems to say, might just define the category.

  Orange clearly knows that the antidote to a narrative defined mostly by stereotypes is to double down on complexity. “The reason no one is interested in the Native story in general, it’s too sad, so sad it can’t even be entertaining,” one of his characters says. True, “There There” is also a sad book — devastating, actually. It’s also entirely unsentimental about it, and that exquisite mix of unflinching anger and sadness and humor is the source of its power. Just take the prologue, a piece of prose so searing that it set off a four-day publisher bidding war for reasons that are immediately apparent when you read it. (“Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people — which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, is now out of circulation.”)

  Orange’s mission is to tell the story of “a present-tense people.” Part of the way he does that is by chronicling, with bitter and empathetic clarity, how a community passes down the pain of a history that includes state-mandated genocide, the way everything — drinking and drugs, TV and superstition — can be a coping mechanism. Tony Loneman has “the Drome,” his nickname for fetal alcohol syndrome, an imprint of his pregnant mother’s drinking. “It’s the way history lands on a face,” he says. Octavio Gomez’s childhood is marked by gunfire and a drunk-driving incident that kills his entire family. Blue narrowly escapes a husband who beats her by catching a Greyhound to Oakland. Jacquie Red Feather is a substance abuse counselor who struggles to stay sober after her daughter killed herself 13 years prior.

  And yet. “All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal,” Orange writes. “Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient.” How do you write about an ocean of pain without getting swallowed up by the tragedy of it all? There’s one moment in the book I think is telling: when young Dene Oxendene finds out that his uncle Lucas, a filmmaker, has died, Dene takes Lucas’ camera and records his mother crying, even as he looks away.

  That seems to be exactly what Orange is doing: homing in, documentary-like, on the details, using fiction as a camera that sees and records without mythologizing. As a reader, you’re not constantly dissolving into tears because you’re too busy admiring the world Orange lets you into, with its ordinary moments and unlikely triumphs. The characters play around with drones, listen to MF Doom or electronic music with powwow drum samples or Beethoven, exchange texts and send emails that never get a response. Or, in Jacquie Red Feather’s case, haul a mini-fridge with the taunting, clinking little bottles out of her hotel room and toss all the bottles into the pool. Orange even gives someone’s constipation emotional heft.

  Take all these perspectives together, and their effect is to show life, specifically native life, as a collective, connected endeavor. Each episode reverberates in the others, whether it’s through tangled familial ties or the simple proximity of people drawn together at Oakland’s Indian Center, where half-siblings unwittingly meet and one character’s counselor is another’s mother. Orange knows well the power of telling stories — but, more to the point, of telling good stories, ones that sublimely render the truth of experiences that are passed over or have only previously been painted with a cartoonishly broad brush. Stories, like “There There,” that challenge all other stories to be better.

  Chelsea Leu is a researcher and writer at Wired. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

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