There There

A collection of indigenous stories about 12 people who are unknowingly connected in that they’re all about to collide at an upcoming powwow event. Incredible and poignant, this was an amazing book that brings to light part of America’s atrocious past and how it still impacts native Americans generations later. Full of historical details and personal traumas. This is not an uplifting story, but the best historical fiction works aren’t cookie cutter happily ever afters. Book #68 in 2024

Second time reading, both audio books. Which is why I forgot id read it already. Multiple narratives. The Alcatraz section was informative, rounding out the bits of history already known.

4.5!!!

This neatly woven tale of several people’s path and underlying motivations for attending a pow wow in Oakland. The stories were uniformly heartbreaking and yet the people’s will to live was strong. All of the people were grappling with what it means to be native. I was frustrated at the lack of resolution in the end.

I was not sure what I was getting into when I picked up this book but I know I wanted to read more about Native stories. What I got was a philosophical treatise on all things America and a Native, couched neatly in a multi perspective family drama. Specifically, we see over generations that the idea of America for its original people has been a history of evil and tragedy visited upon them without end. Tommy Orange shows us how that violence never stops, but gets reimagined and doled out sometimes by your own people. The timelines that Tommy Orange walk us through show us how this violence erases and then rewrites; often by the oppressors. This erasure leads to lost heritage and broken lineages between generations. Each line of the family tree moving further away from the trunk with almost no common connection but trauma. That’s where the book really shines. Where it highlights the compound effects of generational trauma. In some ways I was reminded of Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” but from a Native perspective. Tommy Orange employs multiple perspectives on what it means to be rudderless and without a home while facing uncertain futures. This divergent perspectives also make the storytelling more dynamic. Characters relive histories as a way of rebuilding the self and community while also reclaiming the narrative. All the while the author raises questions of how modern technology helps to amplify agency or diminish it.