Excerpt from “There There” (Tommy Orange)
Excerpt from the prologue of the book , “There There”", by Tommy Orange
Urban Indians were the generation born in the city. We’ve been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. All our relations. The process that brings anything to its current form—chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise—doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth. Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth? Were they shipped in from Mars, the moon? Is it because they’re processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? Are we so different? Were we at one time not something else entirely, Homo Sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-bang quantum theory? Cities form in the same way as galaxies. Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage even fry bread—which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t tradition, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.
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Tommy Orange is an American writer from Oakland, California, and a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. His first novel, There There, was one of the finalists for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2019 PEN/Hemmingway Award, the John Leonard Prize, and the American Book Award. Learn more about / purchase There There here. This excerpt is part of our Fall 2021 collection, Sacred Relationship, exploring the Native American sense of sacred relationship with Earth’s other living creatures.
