Each wishes for something different from the event. Various characters are heading to the Big Oakland Powwow, where there will be a dancing competition with a large cash prize. As if anticipating a reader who expects a book about mythical figures who commune only with trees and grass, the prologue scoffs: “Buildings, freeways, cars – are these not of the earth?” They live in Oakland, ride bikes and drive postal vans. When they appear, Orange’s characters look nothing like their Hollywood avatars. Too many have been taught their history by saccharine Thanksgiving Day parades and cowboy movies in which Native Americans are acted by an “Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody”. Why all this history? Because Orange cannot rely on his readers to know it. “They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we were intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies.” The prelude goes on to describe how European settlers murdered Native American people. Orange moves from this glowing TV head to the severed head of the chief of the Wampanoag, which was kept on a spike outside the Plymouth colony. The image of a headdress-wearing head was used as the TV test card after the day’s programming had ended. The book’s prologue begins not with a character but with the Indian Head. And to tell the story of his small cast of characters Orange gives his readers a sense of the great sweep of history that was initiated when a group of settlers showed up and took a continent from the people living there. There There is simultaneously the story of a small group of “Urban Indians” living in Oakland and the story of “Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNDs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all”. Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. H ow do you rewrite the story of a people? This question shapes Tommy Orange’s sorrowful, beautiful debut novel.

There there book cover