By documenting contemporary urban Native life in all its complexities, Orange demonstrates that the rural nostalgia often invoked in stories about Native people is itself a kind of colonialism. The devastating events of the day of the Big Oakland Powwow are told across shifting perspectives, evading easy definition. Jacquie and Harvey’s memories of Alcatraz confirm and contradict each other. As he explores his uncle’s interview records, Dene struggles to distinguish between transcription and script. This tension-between the stories that free and the stories that trap-animates the entire novel. 40), Dene says as he presents his documentary project to a grant application panel. What we’ve seen is full of the kinds of stereotypes that are the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general” (p.

After his brother’s death, Daniel Gonzales watches Oakland from the camera of a drone, High Street to West Oakland, gentrification captured from a birds-eye view. As Jacquie prepares to return to Oakland, she revisits the memories and people that she left behind, people who have grown and changed without her. 77) of Indigenous art-modernity alongside tradition-exploring what it means to be of a place and of a people. Edwin Black joins the Big Oakland Powwow committee and confronts the “double-blind” (p. Dene rides the BART and remembers the ancestral lands buried under “glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory” (p. In Oakland, the past exerts itself on the present. For the characters of There There, Oakland is the faded pink of the Tribune Tower, the sound of waves against rocks, the smell of a bus stop on Fourteenth and Broadway, the pull of a wound that never quite healed, the quality of light as the sun sets over San Francisco Bay. Throughout the novel, Oakland, California, is brought to life in kinetic detail.

Together, they tell of the plight of the urban Native American-grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Patterns of chance and circumstance draw each character towards the first Big Oakland Powwow: 14-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the first time Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. In There There, Tommy Orange traces the intersecting lives of 12 characters from Native communities whose voices and perspectives converge and conflict and reach across generations.

There there online book