There There

4 ideas

1. The robbery of the Big Oakland Powwow

   Octavio Gomez, who owes a drug debt, plans to rob the dance-contest prize money at the Big Oakland Powwow. He recruits Tony Loneman, a young man with fetal alcohol syndrome, and the crew carries 3D-printed plastic guns past the metal detectors. The robbery collapses into a shootout that kills Tony and leaves fourteen-year-old Orvil Red Feather, dancing publicly for the first time, shot and fighting for his life, so a gathering meant to renew community becomes the site where inherited violence lands on the young.

2. No there there: erased ground

   Gertrude Stein said of her childhood Oakland that 'there is no there there,' meaning the place she remembered had been developed out of existence. The novel applies the phrase to Native people: the land they belonged to has been paved, built over and renamed. What is gone is not only property but the physical referent of their memory and identity.

3. Urban Indians were made by policy

   The novel argues that the large urban Native population is a direct product of federal policy, especially the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which moved people from reservations into cities with promises of jobs and assimilation. Their city life is therefore a continuation of Native history rather than a departure from it. Urban Indians who know freeway noise better than rivers are fully Indian, and the city has become a kind of reservation.

4. Self-assembled identity feels like fraud

   The novel shows that people cut off from transmission must rebuild identity from fragments, and so they experience their real heritage as counterfeit. The authenticity gap comes from the break in transmission, not from any lack in the person.

Save and mark ideas in the app