New Book in Common tells story of ‘Urban Indians’
Native Americans came to the city, novelist Tommy Orange writes, “to start over, to make money, or for a new experience. Some of us came to cities to escape the reservation.” They became Urban Indians.
In his teens Orange wanted to tell their story — and now he has. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland and that’s the locale of “There There: A Novel” ($16 in paperback from Vintage; also for Amazon Kindle).
At first the title sounds soothing, offering comfort. But the words are those of Gertrude Stein, who grew up in Oakland but found later so much change had taken place there was no longer any “there there.”
For one of Orange’s characters, also born and raised in Oakland, the quote embodies reality; “for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.”
“There There” is the Book In Common for 20212022, adopted by Butte College, Chico State, Butte County libraries, the city of Chico and other organizations. Before tracing the intertwining lives of a dozen main characters, all headed to the Grand Powwow at the Oakland Coliseum — and a violent ending, Orange in his prologue details not only historical massacres of Native peoples, but how their faces have been appropriated.
“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.”
Dene Oxendene, filmmaker, mirrors Orange’s boyhood dream of recording the stories of Urban Indians; Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield spends part of her life on Alcatraz during the Native American occupation; drug dealer Octavio looks for easy pickings at the powwow. A character writes: “It’s anyone’s guess what’s gonna happen.”
What does happen is heartbreaking; yet, inescapably, the Urban Indian is no longer faceless.