Key themes
- Urban Native America — the invisible community in American cities
- Violence as the culmination of historical violence that was never acknowledged
- Identity without land — what it means to be Native in a city
About this book
Twelve urban Native Americans converge on Oakland's Big Oakland Powwow — each with their own history of displacement, addiction, family loss and cultural reconnection. Orange's debut is told in overlapping voices that build toward an act of devastating violence, asking what it means to be Native American today in a city built on the erasure of Native existence.
Published in 2018, There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Orange drew on his own experience growing up Native American in Oakland. He has said the title — from Gertrude Stein's line about Oakland — perfectly captured his subject.
Discussion questions
- The Prologue — Orange's own essay about the history of violence against Native people — is one of the most formally unusual openings in recent American fiction. What does it achieve before the novel proper begins?
- The twelve characters all have different relationships to their Native identity — from the deeply traditional to the almost entirely assimilated. How does Orange use this spectrum — and what is he saying about what Native identity means today?
- The novel builds toward an act of violence that the reader can see coming but cannot stop. How does Orange use this inevitability — and what is he saying about the relationship between historical violence and its contemporary echoes?
- The city of Oakland — its geography, its history, its communities — is as much a character as any of the twelve protagonists. How does Orange make place into meaning?
- There There is a debut novel by a first-generation author. What in it feels like a writer discovering a form for the first time — and what has the literary tradition not been able to say about Native American urban life before this book?
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