This novel explores
modern Native American life with a focus on Urban Indians (the author’s preferred
identifier): “We know the sound of the
freeway better than we do the rivers, the howl of distant trains better than
wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber
better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread . . . We ride
buses, trains and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning
to the land.” All twelve of the novel’s characters
live in Oakland, California; besides this connection, they also have in common
a search for identity. Some have
familial connections. All make their way
to a powwow being held in the city.
The title refers to
Gertrude Stein’s observation about Oakland when she returned to visit where she
had grown up and found the city changed so much: “so much development had happened there, that
the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there
anymore.” What the author wants to
emphasize is that the entire world of Native people has been erased: “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.”
One of the characters,
Dene Oxendene, starts an oral history project to tell “the Urban Indian story”,
showing that Indians are not stereotypes:
“the whole picture is not pathetic, and the individual people and
stories that you come across are not pathetic or weak or in need of pity, and
there is real passion there, and rage.”
In many ways Dene Oxendene represents Tommy Orange. His
characters have Native blood but they are not all the same; some are honourable
and some are immoral. Even the reasons
for going to the powwow differ; some go to honour their history and culture,
some go to discover their heritage, and some see the event as a prime
opportunity to commit robbery. Natives
do not share a single identity; one man notes that not knowing his tribe means “I’m
as Native as Obama is black.”
In one way or another,
each of the characters, whether full or half-Native, struggles with what it
means to be Indian in the modern world.
A 14-year-old boy, for example, googles “’What does it mean to be a real
Indian’.” Another man says, “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.”
The novel examines the
effects of centuries of subjugation and degradation at the hands of the white
man. (An Indian woman points out that a
Cheyenne word, veho, “means spider
and trickster and white man.”) The white
man came and said, “Look. See here, the
way it’s gonna be is, first you’re gonna give me all your land, then your
attention, until you forget how to give it.
Until your eyes are drained and you can’t see behind you and there’s nothing
ahead, and the needle, the bottle, or the pipe is the only thing in sight that
makes any sense.” Various characters
struggle with alcoholism, depression, and unemployment. The battles with alcohol are shown to be a
way of coping: “’There’s not some
special relationship between Indians and alcohol. It’s just what’s cheap, available,
legal. It’s what we have to go to when
it seems like we have nothing else left.’”
And there is certainly a lack of cultural inheritance. One character, for instance, learns about his
heritage from the internet: “And
virtually everything Orvil learned about being Indian he’d learned
virtually. From watching hours and hours
of powwow footage, documentaries on YouTube, by reading all that there was to
read on sites like Wikipedia, PowWows.com.”
The author suggests
that stories are a way of reclaiming Native culture. A young girl is told, “’And so what we could
do had everything to do with being able to understand where we came from, what
happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our
stories.” Dene wants to collect Native
stories because “’When you hear stories from people like you, you feel less
alone. When you feel less alone, and like
you have a community of people behind you, alongside you, I believe you can
live a better life.’” Powwows serve a
similar purpose: “We made powwows
because we needed a place to be together. . . . We keep powwowing because there
aren’t many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and
hear each other. . . . The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into
a braid – tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us
here.”
It seems that the
author didn’t trust that fiction could convey his message clearly enough so he
includes a lengthy prologue that highlights events in “a five-hundred-year-old
genocidal campaign.” He describes the
arrival of the white man with his weapons:
“The bullets were premonitions, ghosts from dreams of a hard, fast
future. The bullets moved on after
moving through us, became the promise of what was to come, the speed and the
killing, the hard, fast lines of borders and buildings. They took everything and ground it down to
dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and
the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant
to be forgotten. Stray bullets and
consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.” Certainly this last sentence needs to be
remembered when reading the climactic scene.
The book is very
powerful in its message, but reading it is not easy. Just keeping track of the dozen characters is
difficult. Though I understand the
author’s desire to ensure that his message is heard, I wish that he had been a
little less heavy-handed with some of his passages.
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