Tommy Orange’s book, “There There,” centers around historic and modern gun violence perpetrated against Native Americans. It is Orange’s first book, and it comes straight out of his hometown of Oakland, California. It deserves all of the reviews, it has featured on the first few pages and back cover of the paperback copy, that is still available in the SFCC bookstore. 

The novel works to reshape one’s idea of what it means to be a Native American, especially in modern America. It outlines the principal belief that whiteness has a tendency to drown histories that it doesn’t like or current circumstances of Native American tribes it doesn’t want to be held responsible for. 

Orange portrays colonists’ attempts to destroy and erase all of Native American life. In the prologue of “There There”, Orange states “Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final necessary step in our assimilation, absorption and erasure, the completion of a 500-year-old genocidal campaign.” 

The book also shows how people can see themselves and their actions so differently than the world around them does, through it’s continuous use of symbolism with mirrors as a tool for self-perception.

Each character has something to say about their reflection and that is a token piece of Orange’s display of cultural identity and sense of loss that it can manifest for a person. Orange struggles with the idea of what makes someone true to their cultural identity without forcing the reader into guidelines of what that definition should mean. He drives home the idea that to be part of a culture isn’t to know something about it but to accept it is some way or another, and to desire it be part of you.

Cultural identity also goes back to the idea of what is traditional, and Orange makes the argument that traditionality is an aspect of cultural identity but isn’t all that makes it up, for example, in one portion of the book.

There’s a quote from “There, There” about all that isn’t traditional but is cultural, where Orange seems to be writing directly to the reader and his characters. “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.”