There There Quotes

“The city made us new, and we made it ours.” (Prologue)

– Narrator

Analysis: The unnamed narrator muses on how the movement of Native Americans from reservations into cities was part of government efforts to ensure their “erasure.” However, as the narrator notes victoriously—and as the novel’s characters prove—Native groups did not allow their cultures to be erased. Instead, they began a process of reinvention that has resulted in a dialectic of change and influence between themselves and their home cities.

“Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.” (Prologue)

– Narrator

Analysis: In the prologue, the narrator challenges the idea that for Native people, identity and authenticity are inextricably connected to the premodern natural world. As Orange has said in an interview, his characters are “trying to be Native as they are, and not as something removed from them.” Thus “Indianness” cannot be about returning to something that was never left, and “the land” exists as much in urban Oakland as it does in places rural and remote.

“Buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel… There is no there there.” (Part 1)

– Narrator

Analysis: The narrator presents an archaeology of modern Oakland, describing it as ancestral land now covered with the recent layers of civilization. Dene Oxendene, who is both Native and native to Oakland, has experienced the gentrification of Oakland. The loss of “there”—of the Oakland where Dene grew up—symbolizes the loss of Native lands to conquest all around the country. It also echoes American writer Gertrude Stein’s (1874–1946) famous sentiment about the lost Oakland of her childhood: “There is no there there.”

“They make history seem like one big heroic adventure across an empty forest.” (Part 1)

– Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield

Analysis: In 1970, 11-year-old Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield “hears” her teddy bear, Two Shoes, speaking these words while she is staying on Alcatraz with her mother and sister. Two Shoes seems to speak from Opal’s subconscious, perhaps also tapping into a reservoir of shared cultural consciousness. Here, Two Shoes suggests that history is not an absolute truth but a series of stories told by white people from which any Indian presence and autonomy has been purposefully erased.

“I stopped telling the story… about self-medicating against the disease that was my life… history.” (Part 2)

– Harvey

Analysis: At an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Harvey describes how a central part of overcoming his addiction to alcohol was changing the narrative he told himself about who he was and why he drank. As Harvey notes, this self-destructive narrative was not limited to his own existence but stretched beyond him to blame history itself.

“We’ve been fighting… to be recognized as a present-tense people… only to die… wearing feathers.” (Part 2)

– Narrator

Analysis: In the interlude, the narrator expresses the “unspeakable” and tragic situational irony of the novel’s climax. It brings all its characters together in a horrifying massacre of modern Native people, by Native people, at a powwow in which performers wear traditional dress.

“I feel bad… even saying I’m Native. Mostly I just feel like I’m from Oakland.” (Part 2)

– Calvin Johnson

Analysis: Speaking to Dene Oxendene, Calvin Johnson puts his finger on a contradiction at the heart of modern urban Native identity. Calvin is Native, but at the same time, he has not grown up in a Native community. Nor has he received the traditions and culture of his Native forebears.

“Your drinking, which was related to your skin problems, which was related to your father, which was related to history.” (Part 3)

– Thomas Frank

Analysis: Thomas Frank speaks to himself about the reason he was fired from his job as a janitor at the Indian Center in Oakland. His behavior—showing up to work drunk—is his personal and individual responsibility. Yet it is inseparable from the burden Thomas bears as a modern Native person.

“Acting normal, like they don’t look like what they look like. Indians dressed up as Indians.” (Part 4)

– Orvil Red Feather

Analysis: After the opening dance at the Big Oakland Powwow, Orvil Red Feather muses on the strangeness of the group of dancers in traditional regalia suddenly reverting to being modern urban people in the interlude between dances. The fact that they could be “Indians dressed up as Indians” suggests the twofold and indeterminate nature of Native identity. It is based on blood, but it is also connected to performative aspects of traditional culture.

“It might be some kind of performance art piece. All these people in regalia on the ground like it’s a massacre.” (Part 4)

– Narrator

Analysis: The narrator describes Jacquie Red Feather’s initial shocked reaction as she walks through the field of slain bodies at the Big Oakland Powwow, searching for Orvil Red Feather, the grandson she has never met. It is an actual massacre, but the scene of massacred Indian bodies dressed in traditional regalia bleeding is so horribly and stereotypically “Indian” that she thinks it must be a piece of performance art meant to comment on and draw attention to those stereotypes.