There There

by Tommy Orange

but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing.

like a moment in a movie that makes you feel something for reasons you can’t explain. Something too big to feel, underneath, and inside, too familiar to recognize, right there in front of you at all times. Dene

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.

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.”

Us bears, you Indians, we been through a lot. They tried to kill us. But then when you hear them tell it, they make history seem like one big heroic adventure across an empty forest. There were bears and Indians all over the place. Sister, they slit all our throats.”

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

just like silence is not just silence but is not speaking up.

The trickster spider, Veho, her mom used to tell her and Opal about, he was always stealing eyes to see better. Veho was the white man

who came and made the old world watch with his eyes.

That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.

We all fuck up. It’s how we come back from it that matters.”