But Orange clearly understands that he has little choice if he’s aiming for an honest portrayal of the Native community. The guilt it will evoke in some, the horror it will trigger in all, are enough to make many drop the book on reflex. It takes guts to dive headlong into this abyss of genocide, to plunge his readers in with him, to make them swim in the brutality. The cast of characters that populates Orange’s fiction lives under this very real cloud, the ghost of gunsmoke that hung over battlefields carpeted with the bodies of their ancestors. In my experience, they are rarely exaggerated. Colonists surrounded their village, set it on fire, and shot any Pequot who tried to escape.”Īs a history buff, I’ve more than once googled claims like these before. Here’s a relatively innocuous taste: “In 1637, anywhere from four to seven hundred Pequot gathered for their annual Green Corn Dance. Orange shows us betrayals, massacres, beheadings, often spelled out in gory detail. The novel’s prologue starts as a litany of atrocities that the Native people have endured at the hands of Europeans who came to settle the vast tract of land that they would yank away for themselves to make the United States of America. Orange must love a challenge: if he wants his work to overcome this inherent sadness, to rise above the level of a dirge, he starts by digging himself into a mighty deep hole. As Dene puts it: “What we’ve seen is full of the kinds of stereotypes that are the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general, it’s too sad, so sad it can’t even be entertaining.”

Orange and Dene both realise the pitfalls of telling any part of the Native American story. It is surely no coincidence that Dene introduces himself to the panel as “an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arpaho tribes of Oklahoma,” a phrase repeated word-for-word in the author bio on the book’s dust jacket. We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story.”ĭene’s movie pitch is a thin veil for Orange’s own goals in writing There There. Laying out his vision for a documentary about the lives and culture of the modern-day Urban Indian (the term used for Native Americans living in major American cities like the novel’s Oakland, California setting), Dene tells the judges: “I want to bring something new to the vision of the Native experience as it’s seen on the screen.

Tommy Orange is a new writer with an old heart.” Louise ErdrichĮarly in Tommy Orange’s impressive debut novel There There, young aspiring filmmaker Dene Oxendene gives an oral presentation to a panel of judges considering his pet project for a grant. “ A comic vision haunted by profound sadness.

Tony loneman there there