Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.

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.

Orange reflects on this notion with reflective, poetic precision: It should be noted, not insignificantly, that this violence will be perpetrated using plastic guns stark white in color, for always within the background of There There are the not-so-subtle reminders that these characters are hardly the lone architects of their crushing situations. But no matter what their standing is in relation to their tribe, each of these characters is headed toward one fateful destination: The Big Oakland Powwow.Įach of the twelve characters has a purpose at the powwow: a young man will partake in his first native dance, another will act as the event’s emcee while a group of others plan a robbery using 3D-printed guns they’ll smuggle past metal detectors. Many of Orange’s protagonists - there are twelve weaved together through separate narratives - often feel adrift within the amorphous non-white population, sometimes unaware of their own heritage. There There is modern and gritty, and its characters are people you might encounter anywhere in the Bay Area or across the country, perhaps mistaking them for Latinx, lost in a shade of brown, as often happens with characters in the book. In There There, he casts aside archetypal narratives of Native Americans on the range and shifts his focus on urban American Indians, setting his book in his hometown. Orange, who hails from Oakland, California, is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma.

The raw energy within the novel is uncontaminated, fierce, and dedicated toward a singular purpose: to peel back the reader’s eyes and force them to bear witness to the plight of America’s original inhabitants, lest we forget that non-natives are but immigrants or the descendants of immigrants to this country. In an America overwhelmed by an administration that has gone to extremes to suppress the rights of minorities and the disenfranchised, There There (Penguin, 2018) shines bright, illuminating a dark corner of our country that demands to be seen. Tommy Orange’s debut has come at the perfect time.

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