There There

by Tommy Orange

He wants it to look like he’s in control of his hair, like being bald is his personal choice, but the faintest hint of hair appears on the sides and not a trace at the crown.

It’s dirt cheap over there,”

clenches his jaw and blinks a slow blink at this:

“There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile

Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.

He probably used the quote at dinner parties and made other people like him feel good about taking over neighborhoods they wouldn’t have had the guts to drive through ten years ago.

for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.

We had our own way of naming before white people came over and spread all those dad names around in order to keep the power with the dads.”

They just said the whole thing and it was funny.

I wanted to ask my mom more about the island, but I knew she didn’t like to talk on the bus.

“Why should we speak our business around people we don’t even know?” she’d say.

I’ll use my sacred bear medicine on them, it’ll put them to sleep. It’ll be like instantaneous hibernation. That’s what I’ll do, Sister, so don’t worry. Creator made me strong to protect you,”

“Roosevelt said, ‘I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.’

“I’m still afraid of the dark,” he said. And it was like he was telling me something else.

“They’re lying to us now” scared me. Like it had two different meanings and I didn’t know what either one was. I asked my mom what the lie was, but she just stared off toward the sun, her whole face became a squint. I didn’t know what to do except to sit there and wait to see what she would say. A

Does what we try most to avoid come after us because we paid too much attention to it with our worry?

The catch, or the double bind, about the whole thing is this: If it isn’t pulling from tradition, how is it Indigenous? And if it is stuck in tradition, in the past, how can it be relevant to other Indigenous people living now, how can it be modern?

don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor.

When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like “sore losers” and “move on already,” “quit playing the blame game.” But is it a game?

This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff.

We get used to everything to the point that we even get used to getting used to everything.