There There Summary and Analysis

Prologue, Part 1 (Tony Loneman, Dene Oxendene) Summary

There There is divided into four parts that are, in turn, broken into sections that use a character’s name as a title for each. This guide designates the parts of the novel and combines sections, placing the titles in parentheses.

The first section begins with an unnamed narrator using the first-person plural voice to describe historical instances of whites promoting and celebrating the killing of Indians. Yet Indians have survived and reinvented themselves, just as in the “old Cheyenne story about a rolling head” that refuses to be stopped, even in death. Stories of massacres are facts of life for modern Indians. Many are now “Urban Indians,” indigenous to their home cities just as their ancestors were intimately connected to “the land.”

Tony Loneman is a young Oakland Native man with fetal alcohol syndrome who has gotten involved with Octavio Gomez, a Native drug dealer. Octavio tells Tony they will rob the upcoming Big Oakland Powwow of its cash prize to pay off Octavio’s drug debt. Octavio wants Tony to buy the bullets and commit the robbery dressed in Indian regalia.

Dene Oxendene, another young Oakland Native man, applies for and receives a grant to film the Native people of Oakland telling their stories. He tells the grant committee, “We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story. What we’ve seen is full of… stereotypes.”

Prologue, Part 1 (Tony Loneman, Dene Oxendene) Analysis

The prologue introduces the reader to Indians’ long history of disembodiment, massacre and continued existence. It thus contextualizes the stories that follow, which are told from the perspective of multiple characters who are unsure of their identities but determined to live in the face of uncertainty and violence. The narrator’s voice in the prologue and later interludes unites what might otherwise appear to be only a loosely connected series of vignettes. Using the first-person plural voice, the narrator addresses the reader from the perspective of a repository of historical knowledge and cultural experience.

These first sections lay the foundation for the novel’s broader cultural and historical context but also raise the novel’s other central concerns. Among these are the questions of what it means to be Native and the telling of one’s stories as personal empowerment.