There There Background

The New Native Renaissance

With his debut novel There There, Tommy Orange was hailed as a key player in what some have called the “new Native Renaissance.” The term, coined by Native American journalist Julian Brave NoiseCat) in The Paris Review, underscores the young generation’s ties to the Native Renaissance literary movement of the 1960s through the 1990s. During those decades, Native American literary voices flourished and received critical and popular acclaim. Important authors of the first Native Renaissance include N. Scott Momaday (1934–), Sherman Alexie (1966–), Louise Erdrich (1954–), and Leslie Marmon Silko (1948–).

The young generation of Native writers seeks to express the complex truths of the contemporary Native American experience. This modern and varied experience can be very different from the portraits of the indigenous experience and reservation life often portrayed by the writers of the first Native Renaissance. Just as the subjects of this literature defy easy categorization into preconceived notions of what it means to be Native American, the literature itself defies categorization within accepted literary forms. These works blend narrative fiction, political and cultural analysis and criticism, poetry, and memoir into new hybrid literary forms. Such forms are better able to speak to the complex political, cultural and personal realities of the range of 21st-century Native American experiences.

Other notable Native American writers creating artistically and politically important literary works include Driftpile Cree poet Billy-Ray Belcourt (1995–) and Seabird Island First Nation writer Terese Marie Mailhot (1983–). Belcourt became the youngest recipient of the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2018 for This Wound Is a World (2017), a collection of poetry centered on Belcourt’s experience as a queer and indigenous person. Mailhot is the author of Heart Berries: A Memoir (2018), a bestselling and critically acclaimed memoir of her life on a reservation in Canada.

History and Contemporary Urban Indians

There There sets out to give voice to the experiences of Urban Indians (Orange capitalizes the term in the novel) by focusing on a variety of Native American characters who are all from Orange’s hometown of Oakland, California. The characters and their experiences in this setting are drawn directly from Orange’s life, a fact he acknowledged in a 2018 interview: “All of them have me in them, and details from my actual life were put into them.” Many of the characters grapple with what it means to be Native American when one’s roots lie neither in nature nor a reservation but in a modern American city.

Much of the modern migration of Native Americans from rural reservations to cities occurred as a result of the U.S. government’s efforts to force Native Americans to assimilate into white culture. Although the government has since its inception made efforts to eradicate Native American culture in the United States, in the mid-20th century, it undertook a distinct series of steps to permanently erase Native identity. To solve what it called the “Indian Problem,” the government removed Native Americans from reservations so the lands could be sold and developed to generate revenue.

One such program was the Voluntary Relocation Program. From the early 1950s to the 1970s, this program enticed Native Americans off the reservations by offering them several hundred dollars and transportation to cities, including Oakland, Chicago, Dallas and Cleveland. Hopes of a better life in the city were often dashed. Relocated Indians found themselves living in poverty and facing discrimination with limited access to resources or opportunities. A major part of this effort of cultural genocide was the passage of laws including the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. Known collectively as the policies of termination and relocation, these laws removed federal assistance to tribes, ordered the dissolution of reservations, and parceled reservation lands to individual tribe members. Following the 1969 Native American activist occupation of Alcatraz, an island used as a prison in the San Francisco Bay, President Richard Nixon (1913–94) proposed to end the termination policy and implement a federal policy of “self-determination.” Self-determination focused on promoting the rights of Native American tribes to practice autonomous self-governance. The legislation was passed in 1975, and some Native lands and tribal statuses were restored as well.