There There

by Tommy Orange

How can I not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when I am least expecting it?

Your face

“Got more soul than a sock with a hole.”

Holy socks

Dene is not recognizably Native. He is ambiguously nonwhite. Over the years he’d been assumed Mexican plenty, been asked if he was Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Salvadoran once, but mostly the question came like this: What are you?

What are you

“There There,” by Radiohead. The hook is “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

Title reference

he remembered it viscerally.

Rsemembering

he got this look in his eyes, it was something Dene had seen in his mom’s eyes, something that looked like remembering and dreading at once.

Remember and dread

He’s the kind of bald that requires a daily shave. 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. He’s got a sizable but neat light brown beard, which is clearly compensation for the lack of hair up there, plus a trend now, white hipsters everywhere trying to come off as confident, all the while hiding their entire faces behind big bushy beards and thick black-rimmed glasses.

Modern bald hilpsters

“There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. 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.

Title ref-- gertrude stein

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.

Title ref again

Stories are invaluable, but to pay is to appreciate. And this is not just qualitative data collection. I want to bring something new to the vision of the Native experience as it’s seen on the screen. We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story. What we’ve seen is full of the kinds of stereotypes that are the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general, it’s too sad, so sad it can’t even be entertaining, but more importantly because of the way it’s been portrayed, it looks pathetic, and we perpetuate that, but no, fuck that, excuse my language, but it makes me mad, because the whole

Stories

The good thing was, the kids didn’t have to do anything to my name to make fun of me, no rhymes or variations. They just said the whole thing

And it was funny

The more important-seeming Indians tended to get mad more easily. These were the men. And the women weren’t listened to as much as our mom would have liked.

Male vs fem

laughing in that wild, cruel way teenagers have about them.

Teens

“You’re not an Indian, TS. You’re a teddy bear.” “You know, we’re not so different. Both of us got our names from pig-brained men.”

2shoes

“You gotta know about the history of your people. How you got to be here, that’s all based on what people done to get you here. 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.”

Bears and Indians

He either had something to say or he didn’t.

Talking

Our mom had always told us the most important thing we could do was to get educated, and that people won’t listen to you otherwise.

Educated

The trouble with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief. I’ve

Belief

all this time I’ve spent doing almost nothing. Four years of sitting, staring into my computer at the internet.

Doing nothing

Bill’s not an asshole. If anything he goes out of his way to be nice, to make conversation with me. It’s the forced nature of it.

Forced

There’s almost too much information out there. The internet is like a brain trying to figure out a brain. I depend on the internet for recall now. There’s no reason to remember when it’s always just right there, like the way everyone used to know phone numbers by heart and now can’t even remember their own. Remembering itself is becoming old-fashioned.

Too much info and Remembering

I find out that the same neurotransmitter related to happiness and well-being supposedly has to do with your gastrointestinal system. There’s something wrong with my serotonin levels. I read about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which are antidepressants. Would I have to take antidepressants? Or would I have to reuptake them? — I stand up and back away from the computer, put my head all the way back to stretch my neck.

Serotonin

eating is the most direct path to getting the feeling that you’re alive. This feeling or thought is interrupted by a craving for Pepsi.

Eating and feeling alive

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

Fatness

I wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum policies on modern Native identity, and the literature written by mixed-blood Native authors that influenced identity in Native cultures. All without knowing my tribe. Always defending myself. Like I’m not Native enough.

Knowing myself

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? So to get close to but keep enough distance from tradition, in order to be recognizably Native and modern-sounding, is a small kind of miracle these three First Nations producers made happen on a particularly accessible self-titled album, which they, in the spirit of the age of the mixtape, gave away for free online.

Indigenous music

He tells himself he means more. He tells himself he can tell himself and believe it. But it’s not true. There’s no room here for old people like Bill anymore. Anywhere.

Room for old people

their hyper-PC gentle way of being while lacking all social graces and old-world manners and politeness. Edwin’s this way too. Tech-savvy, sure, but when it comes to the real cold hard gritty world outside, beyond the screen, without the screen, he’s a baby.

Manners and politeness

Even the old people in charge, they’re acting like kids. There’s no more scope, no vision, no depth. We want it now and we want it new. This world is a mean curveball thrown by an overly excited, steroid-fueled kid pitcher, who no more cares about the integrity of the game than he does about the Costa Ricans who painstakingly stitch the balls together by hand.

Oldsters acting like kids

just chewing and spitting until all the innings run out.

Chewing and spitting

Let the years dissolve the way they could when you were somewhere else inside them, in a book, on the block, in a dream.

Prison years reading

Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of.

Bipolar

Everyone she saw seemed either too serious or not serious enough.

Serious conference

silence is not just silence but is not speaking up.

Silence

When we see that the story is the way we live our lives, only then can we start to change, a day at a time. We try to help people like us, try to make the world around us a little better. It’s then that the story begins.

Story begins

The word stupid often sounds in his head when he looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn’t know why, but it seems important.

Mirrors

the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.

To be Indian

We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t very many places where we get to all be together, where we get to see and hear each other.

Powwows

Native blood quantum was introduced in 1705 at the Virginia Colony. If you were at least half Native, you didn’t have the same rights as white people. Blood quantum and tribal membership qualifications have since been turned over to individual tribes to decide.

Nativde blood

The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And 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. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?

Resiliency

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. Then someone from up on the yacht says, “It’s too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings.”

Floating

gets out his phone like everyone does now when they want to leave without leaving.

Leaving

But projection as a concept is a slippery slope because everything could be projection.

Projecgtion

Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories.

Old drinking stories

it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it. Something she always notices is how much confidence and lack of self-doubt people have.

Drink talk

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. —JAMES BALDWIN

Hx

Opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her—rise up to her eyes. Sometimes she can’t move. Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. But that’s okay because she’s become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. More than one thing at a time preferably. Like delivering mail and listening to an audiobook or music. The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers.

Distraction in layers

Opal believes there is a dark curiosity alive in each of us. She believes we all do precisely what we think we can get away with.

Dark curiosity

Death alone eludes hard work and hardheadedness. That and memory. But there’s no time and no good reason most of the time to look back. Leave them alone and memories blur into summary.

Emories

Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy.

Secrets