There There

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Tommy Orange's There There shines a light on a segment of America that is seldom observed--the urban Indian. Orange's book covers a group of Indians living in Oakland, California, leading up to a powwow at Oakland Coliseum, and examines their lives and place in American culture.

Orange uses a variety of points of view, using first, second, and third person, sometimes for the same character. The story is centered around a group of Indians who are either going to, working for, or planning to rob the powwow, where Indians dress up in their traditional costume.

Orange also comments on what it's like to be an Indian, not just in the narrative, but in his own prologue: "We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people. We have the sad, defeated Indian silhouette, and the heads rolling down temple stairs, we have it in our heads, Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne’s six-shooter slaying us, an Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts in movies...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."

Each chapter is from the point of view of a different character. Tony Loneman is an Indian with the "drome," fetal alcohol syndrome: "I’m twenty-one now, which means I can drink if I want. I don’t though. The way I see it, I got enough when I was a baby in my mom’s stomach. Getting drunk in there, a drunk fucking baby, not even a baby, a little fucking tadpole thing, hooked up to a cord, floating in a stomach." Jacquie Red Feather and her sister, Opal Victoria Bear Shield, went with their parents to a protest on Alcatraz, where Jacquie was impregnated with a baby she later gave up for adoption (and who will later show up as a person at the powwow). She has three grandchildren, whom Opal raises. Tony is in league with a trio of hoodlums, who have their own story of tragedy.

One character I would like to heard more from was Bill Davis, a janitor at Oakland Coliseum: "Bill moves through the bleachers with the slow thoroughness of one who’s had a job too long. He slogs along, plods, but not without pride. He immerses himself in his job. He likes to have something to do, to feel useful, even if that work, that job, is currently in maintenance. He is picking up garbage missed by the initial postgame crew...There’s no room here for old people like Bill anymore. Anywhere."

At times it's a bit confusing who everyone is and how they are related to each other. Some characters have relationships to each other that they don't even realize. And then in the climax, many of the characters are killed off, and we get several descriptions of what it's like to die. I was a bit disappointed in the ending, as it was like the ending of one of the Westerns that Orange disdains, with a bloodbath.

The title refers to both Gertrude Stein's comment about Oakland, that there is "no there there," (which Orange believes was misinterpreted) and the Radiohead song. A lot of pithy statements about everything from Motown to baseball are included, including this one I liked about the former: "That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so."

At times the book seems to bend over backwards to remind us that Indians of today are just as involved with modern culture as the rest of us, and are not stuck in the old ways. We get it. Indians are on the Internet. But for the most part I found the writing, which is at times in a kind of clumsy language that Indians used to be saddled with back in the old movies, to be poignant and sharp.