In 1864, Colonel John Chivington of the Third Colorado Cavalry Regiment led a force of 700 men who mercilessly slaughtered almost 170 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, two-thirds of whom were women and children. Considered today a genocide and remembered with monuments, the Sand Creek massacre was one of the bloodiest of its time, alongside others like Bear River or Wounded Knee. It is also the moment when the story of There There (AdN) begins, the new novel by American writer Tommy Orange (Oakland, California, 1982), who tells La Lectura with a smile the irony behind the book.
"I had never thought of writing anything historical or delving into the Native past. In fact, when I published There There [his first novel, Pulitzer Prize finalist, which we will come back to later], I was tired of claiming that I wanted to narrate the contemporary life of Native Americans, our present, and criticizing that all our representations were always made from the past and we needed to escape those age-old stereotypes. But I couldn't help it," confesses the author, half Cheyenne, half Arapaho. And it was on a trip to Sweden to promote this first book that he discovered in a museum the terrible history of Castillo de San Marcos, a Spanish fort located in Florida where numerous Native prisoners were held during one of the many Indian wars.
"Half of the prisoners there between 1875 and 1878 were from my tribe, and that's where Richard Henry Pratt began to implement his ideas [a controversial former military man and educator who created acculturation and assimilation programs and coined the phrase "kill the Indian, save the man"], who ended up creating a national system of Indian boarding schools. So, I found it interesting to try to capture that reality and, in a way, integrate it into the sequel I was already preparing," explains Orange.
But let's start at the beginning. Published and set in 2018, his debut novel tells the story of 12 Native American characters, from different tribes and generations, who attend a powwow - an event where members of any tribe gather to sing, dance, socialize, and honor their culture - and through their various stories shows what it really means to be one of the approximately six million Native Americans in the present day. Something that he achieved by avoiding stereotypes and with extreme truthfulness, born from the oral texture of language and the everyday lives of the characters, who face common problems like a mass shooting, the opioid crisis, school dropout, all types of addictions, and deep reflections on identity and authenticity.
"I wanted to reflect the multiplicity of the lives of those I know, build a choral narrative with all those voices that we never see reflected in literature, art, or cinema,"
Currently a distance learning teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Orange assures that much of the inner life and problems of his characters come from his personal experience. "I was born and raised in Oakland, a working-class, multiracial city very close to San Francisco, and worked in the indigenous community there for ten years. And although I didn't base any of the characters on real people, except for myself and a bit of my family, when comparing them to reality, I see an undeniable influence," he reflects sincerely. "My idea was to reflect the multiplicity of the lives of those I know, build a choral narrative with all those voices that we never see reflected in literature, art, or cinema."
In this sense, the widely recognized achievement of Orange, also a winner of awards such as the John Leonard, the PEN/Hemingway, or the American Book Award, is to shape a kaleidoscopic portrait of urban identity, that is, contemporary, of Native Americans. "This vision is not at all meritorious, it is simply based on telling a reality that is not excessively recent. As I show in my second novel, the process of acculturation is secular, although it is true that it was particularly intense from the massive exodus that occurred in the 1950s and 60s, when we were called sidewalk Indians, cultureless refugees. But although many of us, the majority today, were born in cities, we are what our ancestors did, the common memories we don't remember and the blood of the bullets that were shot at us. That is also our world."
"Many of my ancestors had to abandon their traditions, lose their connection to what it means to be Native, in order to survive"
This timeless world that Orange still inhabits is not foreign to There There, also a Pulitzer Prize finalist, in which the author traces the history of the ancestors of the three young Red Feather brothers and their grandmothers, Opal and Jacquie, protagonists of There There, outlining a genealogy marked by racism, genocide, labor abuse, land theft, or cultural suppression... In fact, Orange does not deny that several of the national myths of the United States [like the horrific doctrine of manifest destiny] were built against his people. Even someone with as good historical press as Theodore Roosevelt stated: "I wouldn't dare say that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but nine out of ten are, and I'd prefer not to have to look too closely into the tenth case".
This quest to unite past and present resonates strongly in this novel where Lony, one of the three Red Feather brothers, says: "everyone thinks we're from the past, but we're here. And because they don't know that we're still here, it's as if we're in the future". That's why Orange highlights the ability to distill in those early chapters, the first third of the book before returning to 2018, the deep wounds of history in intimate episodes and fragments of memory that come to life vividly and painfully, as if they were happening in the present.
"Everything is connected, which complicates the existence of cultural pride and also the passing down of customs from generation to generation. Currently, the culture and history of indigenous peoples have been reduced to a one-note melody (flute or drum), they have become mere myths full of exoticism and mysticism that present us as subhuman beings or magical forest creatures," denounces the writer.
Therefore, he believes that today is a great time to reclaim those roots, something he attributes, in part, to the success of his novels. "Many of my ancestors had to abandon their traditions, lose their connection to everything that being Native implies, with a worldview and values rooted in it, in order to survive. And even until recently, assimilation was a way not to survive, but to thrive," he argues.
For example, he comments, "my father [a Native American ceremonial leader] was very aware and proud of his Indianness, but he never wanted to pass on that learning or his language," laments Orange, who does not know any Native language. "Perhaps due to similar cases, or due to the current role of identity, today there are many families curious or desperate to know more about themselves and their origins, and they will turn to any available resource. And among them is literature."
"Today there are many people and families who want to know more about their origins, and literature is a great tool to build an identity"
A literature as he conceives it, choral, open, and with varied characters, capable of an eclecticism like the one that has marked his multicultural life. "As a writer, I am fascinated by the theory expressed by Ursula K. Le Guin in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which she wonders what would happen if the hero were not the most important character in the story and the stories were not articulated by a conflict," he shares. "We have heard all the versions of the story about the hero who kills the mammoth and returns home triumphantly with the meat, that's why I believe it is more interesting to read stories narrated from more than one perspective and to write novels with different points of view, with a diverse community voice, about people we may not have heard anything about," he concludes.
Still based in his native Oakland, Orange explains that after his great success, almost nothing has changed. "Throughout my adult life, even in childhood, I have been concerned about money and now I can make a living from writing. I have also learned to speak in public almost by force, as if I were thrown into the water and learned to swim. But otherwise, I have the same childhood friends -except for some from the literary world, like Kaveh Akbar- and most of the people I interact with are not readers, writers, or even artists," he assures.
His next book, whose final draft he will deliver next week, is something completely different yet similar. The protagonist is inspired by the Canadian singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie who self-identified as Cree for decades until research proved otherwise. In reality, she was born in the United States, and she was not adopted, but her parents were of English and Italian descent. "Continuing with the exploration of identity, I wanted to reflect on what it means to be a fraud, and she, the most famous Native American musician, if not the most important person of modern times for my people, was perfect," he concludes.