There There

by Tommy Orange

In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times. —BERTOLT BRECHT

All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image.

When they first came for us with their bullets, we didn’t stop moving even though the bullets moved twice as fast as the sound of our screams, and even when their heat and speed broke our skin, shattered our bones, skulls, pierced our hearts, we kept on, even when we saw the bullets send our bodies flailing through the air like flags, like the many flags and buildings that went up in place of everything we knew this land to be before. The bullets were premonitions, ghosts from dreams of a hard, fast future. The bullets moved on after moving through us, became the promise of what was to come, the speed and the killing, the hard, fast lines of borders and buildings. They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.

The process that brings anything to its current form—chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise—doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth.

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

Everything is new and doomed.

Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is ...

I tried but couldn’t make the face that I found there my own again.

The Drome taught me to look past the first look people give you, find that other one, right behind it.

They wear that shit like there’s a sign in their hands, the sign says: Come Get Me. They look at me like I already did some shit, so I might as well do the shit they’re looking at me like that for.

like having a hole in a sock gives the sock character, means it’s worn through,

gives it a soul, and also like the bottom of your foot showing through, to the sole of your foot.

It was so fucking white for him to use the word snow for coke.

you don’t stare, you don’t even glance, but you don’t totally not look either. Out of respect you acknowledge. You look and don’t look.

Anything to avoid the question: Whatchyoulookingat? There is no good answer for this question. Being asked this question means you already fucked up.

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

His mind is a mess of misfires.

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.”

so I was supposed to carry that big old name around with honor.

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.

watched the long gray Oakland streets stream by the bus window like it was an old movie she liked but had seen too many times to notice anymore.

The more important-seeming Indians tended to get mad more easily.

It’s that kind of mercy they don’t want you to know about.”

But then when you hear them tell it, they make history seem like one big heroic adventure across an empty forest.

She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories.

One day she just holed up there on the couch in Ronald’s living room. She got smaller and smaller.

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

staring first in horror at the computer dying, then at my face reacting to seeing my face react to the computer dying.

but after four years it was the socially unacceptable kind of sad.

Screen-saver dreams.

There’s something about seeing Johnny Depp fail so badly that gives me strength.

Links just lead to links that can lead you all the way back to the twelfth century. This is how it can all of a sudden be six in the morning,

The internet is like a brain trying to figure out a brain.

Remembering itself is becoming old-fashioned.

Typing in the search bar before I can even think to do it. Before I can think I am thinking with it.

the tongue correlates with the brain stem almost directly, and so eating is the most direct path to getting the feeling that you’re alive.

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

I’m as Native as Obama is black.