Book Club Prep: There There | NYU Skirball Center

There was so much he’d missed, hadn’t been given. Hadn’t been told. In that moment, in front of the TV, he knew. He was a part of something. Something you could dance to.

Tommy Orange’s debut novel took the literary world by storm in 2018. The novel weaves together the stories of 12 characters who will all converge at the same powwow in Oakland, in the book’s climax. This braided structure, offering myriad perspectives rather than a singular protagonist, complicates & add complexity to the flattening stereotypes and limited representation of Native Americans in US culture. And there’s a sequel in the works, as of November 2020.

Nov 20, 2020 | #book club, #virtual

NYU Skirball Book Club: There There by Tommy Orange

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Talking Points

If you’re not sure where to start a conversation in a breakout room during Book Club, find an example in the text related to one of these themes. Or, pick a passage that stood out to you and share it with the group.

Discussion questions from Chandani Patel – Director, Global Diversity Education at NYU’s Office of Global Inclusion:

In the first few pages of There, There, Tommy Orange writes, “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” (7). How does this passage relate to the depiction of Native communities in popular culture, especially as we reflect on the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday celebrated in the US? In what ways does the passage relate to the ongoing erasure of Native stories?
There, There provides much for us to think about in terms of the connection between history and personal experience. Halfway through the text, Orange claims, “If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps” (139). How have you reflected on your relationship with your last name? How have you committed to learning more about the historical foundations of the United States tied to genocide and slavery?
Speaking specifically about the experience of Urban Indians, Orange writes, “Getting us to the cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours” (8). How does this quote illuminate the different ideas of home presented throughout the text? What kind of practices do the characters engage in to make a home for themselves?
In the introduction to There, There, Orange names one section “massacre as prologue” and discusses the ways in which indigenous communities inherit narratives about genocides and massacres told to them at an early age. In what ways does the historical violence enacted upon Native populations filter into the modern era? How does violence—both internal and external—appear throughout the narrative and impact each of the character’s understanding of their place in the world?

Get Into It

New York Times

Profile: Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ Is a New Kind of American Epic

For native people, Mr. Orange writes, cities and towns themselves represent the absence of a homeland — a lost world of “buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.”

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New York Times

Review: Yes, Tommy Orange’s New Novel Really Is That Good

In Tommy Orange’s “There There,” an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters.

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NPR

Interview: Native American Author Tommy Orange Feels A 'Burden To Set The Record Straight'

“For Native writers there’s a kind of burden to set the record straight because it’s been told wrong so long. So I was trying to find a way to do it in an interesting way. And I started finding all these connections around the Indian head and all these different ways that the Indian head has played out throughout history.”

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Tommy Orange on Indigenous stereotypes — Tommy Orange on indigenous stereotypes

Bestselling author Tommy Orange never used to read — Tommy Orange on learning to love reading

Tommy Orange on living in Trumpland — Tommy Orange on "Trumpland"

Bestselling author Tommy Orange really did pull spider legs out from inside his body — Tommy Orange on facts vs. fiction

From the Office of Global Inclusion @ NYU

Related media, events or reading materials from NYU’s Office of Global Inclusion, the official Book Club Co-Sponsor

Matthew Frye Jacobson

Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917

In Barbarian Virtues, Matthew Frye Jacobson offers a keenly argued and persuasive history of the close relationship between immigration and America’s newly expansionist ambitions at the turn of the twentieth century. Jacobson draws upon political documents, novels, travelogues, academic treatises, and art as he recasts American political life. In so doing, he shows how today’s attitudes about “Americanism” — from Border Watch to the Gulf War — were set in this crucial period, when the dynamics of industrialization rapidly accelerated the rate at which Americans were coming in contact with foreign peoples.

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Close Reading

In 1637, anywhere from four to seven hundred Pequot gathered for their annual Green Corn Dance. Colonists surrounded their village, set it on fire, and shot any Pequot who tried to escape. THe next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony had a feast in celebration, adn the governor declared it a day of thanksgiving. Thanksgivings like these happened everywhere, whenever there were what we have to call “successful massacres.” At one such celebration in Manhattan, people were said to have celebrated by kicking the heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls. (5)

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. (7)

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. But the city made us new, and we made it ours. … We made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. We did not move to cities to die. (8-9)

An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the eart. All our relations. … Buildings, freeways, cars–are these not of the earth? Were they shipped in from Mars, the moon? Is it because they’re processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? Are we so different? Were we at one time not something else entirely, Homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable prebang quantum theory? Cities form in the same way as galaxies. (11)

Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. … We know the sound of the freeway better than we do 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–which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. (11)

Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere. (11)

They look at me like I already did some shit, so I might as well do the shit they’re looking at me like that for. (17)

I pulled my regalia out and put it on. I went out into the living room and stood in front of the TV. It was the only place in the house I could see my whole body. I shook and lifted a foot. I watched the feathers flutter on the screen. I put my arms out and dipped my shoulders down, then I walked up to the TV. I tightened my chin strap. I looked at my face. The Drome. I didn’t see it there. I saw an Indian. I saw a dancer. (26)

One of the first things Dene learned when he first started taking the bus in Oakland was that you don’t stare, you don’t even glance, but you don’t totally not look either. Out of respect you acknowledge. You look and don’t look. Anything to avoid the question: Whatchyoulookingat? There is no good answer for this question. Being asked this question means you already fucked up. (28)

Dene is not recognizably Native. He is ambiguously nonwhite. Over the years he’d been assumed Mexican plenty, been asked if he was Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Salvadoran once, but mostly the question came like this: What are you? (29)

There on the screen, in full regalia, the dancer moved like gravity meant something different for him. It was like break dancing in a way, Orvil thought, but both new — even cool — and ancient-seeming. There was so much he’d missed, hadn’t been given. Hadn’t been told. In that moment, in front of the TV, he knew. He was a part of something. Something you could dance to. (121)