There There (2018)

Great read ( )

I loved this book! Each voice managed to be funny, heartbreaking, and hopeful all at the same time. I can't wait to read more from this writer. ( )

This multiple award winning novel was both an important narrative and a wonderfully told tale. By using some twelve different narrators, the reader gets a multi view portrait of the urban Native Americans, mostly living in or from Oakland California. Tommy Orange, himself from the area, begins with a riveting prologue tallying the number of atrocities handed down in altered versions as history by the white writers.
"All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image. 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."
The prologue is then followed by chapters of disillusionment and grief as told through the eyes of Tony Loneman, Dene Oxendene, Edwin Black, Jackie Red Feather, my favorite Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, and several others. What at first could be separate short stories starts to come together as we realize all these portraits will be together in one picture at the Big Oakland Powwow, an event that honors the old ways, the dances, the drums and for some a potential big score. While Jackie's grandson Orvil is looking to dance for the cash prize, others are looking to use smuggled in 3D created guns to erase drug debt. The chapters get smaller as the novel progresses toward its climax and the style is effective. I was racing through the ending even as I was assembling the jigsaw pieces of the characters reuniting in strange but touching ways. This was quite a novel, one that will be on my highest recommendation list for others.
NYT
"Nothing in Orange’s world is simple, least of all his characters and his sense of the relationship between history and the present. Instead, a great deal is subtle and uncertain in this original and complex novel."
Lines:
what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland?”“There is no there there,”
talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.

Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of.

Our bumpers and rear windows are covered with Indian stickers like We’re Still Here and My Other Vehicle Is a War Pony and Sure You Can Trust the Government, Just Ask an Indian!; Custer Had It Coming; We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors, We Borrow It from Our Children; Fighting Terrorism Since 1492; and My Child Didn’t Make the Honor List, but She Sure Can Sing an Honor Song.

From the author:
I do hope the reader might take away from the book information about a people misunderstood for too long, and for [the reader] to try to better understand what it might be like to live contemporary lives. And how that might relate to an American history so long sold as the truth when really it was a lie told with the specific aim in mind to persuade the general American to believe American history is clean and maybe even holy or unassailable. ( )

What an amazing read! Each chapter introduces a Native American and their particular story.
All stories converge in the final chapters and this is one of the very very few book to bring tears to my eyes. Very well written bringing the characters to life to the point where you care about them and hope things turn out good for them.
Highly highly recommened! ( )

An ensemble novel, starting with separate characters who turn out to be connected - some by blood, others by the fact of their eventual attendance at the Big Oakland Powwow.

Quotes

We've been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people. (prologue, 7)

Urban Indians were the generation born in the city. We've been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. (prologue, 11)

"Some medicine is poison." (Dene Oxendene, 37)

"There is no there there." (Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography, 38)

"You gotta know about the history of your people. How you got to be here, that's all based on what people done to get you here....They tried to kill us. But then when you hear them tell it, they make history seem like one big heroic adventure across an empty forest. There were bears and Indians all over the place. Sister, they slit all our throats." (Opal Viola Victoria Shield, 51)

Does what we try most to avoid come after us because we paid too much attention to it with our worry? (Edwin Black, 68)

While I was talking something in me reached back to remember all that I'd once hoped I'd be, and placed it next to the feeling of being who I am now. (Edwin Black, 75)

It's no wonder it was getting worse. You can't sell life is okay when it's not. (Jacquie Red Feather, 98)

"And we're either involved and have a hand in each one of their deaths...or we're absent, which is still involvement, just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up." (re: teen suicide, Jacquie Red Feather, 104)

There's an ache when you keep yourself from breathing. A relief when you come up for air. (Jacquie Red Feather, 116)

We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward....We keep powwowing because there aren't very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other. (interlude, 135)

The wound that was made when white people came and tool all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind of history. All these stories we haven't been telling all this time, that we haven't been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we're broken. And don't make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient? (interlude, 137)

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that's how you know you're on board the ship that serves hors d'oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning... (interlude, 137-138)

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them." -James Baldwin (epigraph to Part III)

The thing we most don't want has a way of landing right on top of us. (Octavio Gomez, 185)

"We all fuck up. It's how we come back from it that matters....
That's the way this whole thing is set up. You're not ever supposed to know. Not all the way. That's what makes the whole thing work the way it does. We can't know. That's what makes us keep going." (Fina to Octavio, 186) ( )