Tommy Orange’s There There focuses on undermining the
popular one-sided view of Native Americans and their culture by sharing the diverse
stories of Native lives in an urban setting. The theme of storytelling in the
novel serves to not only create an accurate depiction of life for Natives
today, but also to incorporate the importance of history in Native American
culture and how it works to shape Native identity and community across urban
centers today. Early on, Orange begins to show the importance of keeping past
Native American history alive when the prologue discusses the horrible
treatment of Natives as they were pushed from their land by colonizing
Americans. Orange writes that the English “first came for [Natives] with their
bullets, [but Natives] didn’t stop moving even though the bullets moved twice
as fast as the sound of [Native] screams” (10). This gruesome history is shown
to live on throughout the novel and is foreshadowed when Orange says, “the
bullets moved on after moving through [Native Americans and] became the promise
of what was to come” (10). This history is what led to diversification of
Native people as they began new lives in cities, but the complete cycle of the
past to the present depicted in the novel shows this history remains. History
is also used by characters like Orvil to find identity and understand what it
means to be Native American. Orvil tries to get his grandmother to tell him about
his history but ultimately has to learn from the internet by searching “what
does it mean to be a real Indian” (121).
The Native American reliance on
history to find identity is also discussed in the epigraph to “Part III: The
Return.” It states, “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in
them” (157). This epigraph begins to complete the circle of the novel when it
says, “history is trapped in them.” Orange is saying that, although history is
important and brings identity and community to Native Americans, it is their
history that continues to define them and lead to horrible circumstances that
they cannot seem to escape. The final shooting at the Big Oakland Powwow is a
gruesome depiction of history as it has been experienced by Native Americans. It
symbolizes the hardships that they continue to endure. Even when the Native
community tries to get together to celebrate their culture, they are hunted,
shot down, and dispersed, just as their ancestors were. When Tony decides to
charge the gunman, Charles, he does not let the bullets slow him down, he
decides to keep fighting. Tony runs at Charles and, “when the second bullet
hits him in the leg, he stumbles but doesn’t lose speed” (287). The bullets
from their history continue to hit Native Americans today, but Orange shows
that they will not give up. They will continue to search for community and find
their identity, no matter how diverse they may become. They are trapped in this
history and reality, but they must hold onto this history to continue to find
strength and fight back.
I feel like this repeated history that the Native Americans are trapped in also applies to other aspects of our world’s history. There is a constant cycle of hate and misunderstanding in our history which we have more recently been trying to break. We can obviously see with when it comes to race, gender, sex, and religious related issues. While these oppressed groups have been able to shed more light on the wrongdoing in our pasts, Native Americans have not been able to have the same ability to promote change. When Professor Black was in class, we could see how this cycle was clearly happening in 20th century Native American history. When she discussed the boarding schools and how people wanted to destroy the culture, we could see how it just repeated itself later in the 20th century with the push for Natives to move to cities. It was just a constant repetition of that same philosophy. In the book, when Tony runs at Charles, we could also see this action as an attempt to break the cycle. The section even talks about how "Tony means to sink through anything that gets in his way" (Orange 287). This could be the bullets and Charles, or it could be symbolic of how people try to stop the cycle of history. This book, more specifically this quote, is breaking ground on a long overdue revolution. There is obviously a lot of horribly wrong things in our history, but it is literature like this that starts to chip away at these outdated opinions of lesser known cultures and histories.
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