San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Native voices
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. Halfwhite, 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 statemandated 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 minifridge 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