In that moment, in front of the TV, he knew. “The dancer moved like gravity meant something different for him…There was so much missed, hadn’t been given. So 12-year-old Orvil Red Feather, sees a dancer in full regalia on TV and feels something that propels him into learning about his heritage: “But the city made us new, and we made it ours.” (8) “Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign,” Orange says in the Prologue. Like his characters, he struggled with what it means to be Native American in Oakland, California after centuries of concentrated effort to make that label past-tense. All true.īut Tommy Orange didn’t come by his identity easily. It’s acclaimed for its strong writing, realistic characters, and refusal of stereotype.

It’s a first novel by an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. There, There has been getting a lot of positive press. It’s about the many ways they have lived before they got there. This book is not about the violent ending where the story of the twelve disparate Native American characters comes together. The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.” (141)

Their sound will break water in our bodies, tear sound itself, rip our lives in half.

Later, in an interlude, he reminds you what to look for as the climactic powwow approaches: Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.” (10) The Europeans who ‘settled’ the land “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. Orange tells you this in the non-fiction prologue to the book where he describes what it’s like to be a Native American today. The best way to understand the ending of There, There, Tommy Orange’s new novel, is to remember that the bullets were always coming.

The book there there