The land is everywhere or nowhere for the urban Indian

Wars & Conflicts · Published 17 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: For many Native Americans, the struggle for identity isn't about returning to a sacred mountain range, but navigating the glass and concrete of a modern city. Tommy Orange’s There There explores how history, violence, and heritage collide in the urban sprawl of Oakland, California.

Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, follows 12 characters from Native communities whose lives converge at a volatile powwow in Oakland. Rather than focusing on rural nostalgia—which Orange suggests can be a form of colonialism—the narrative centers on the 'urban Native American.' These characters navigate a landscape of 'glass and concrete and wire and steel,' where the past exerts itself on the present. For these individuals, being Indian is not about a physical return to ancestral lands, but about carrying a complex inheritance of beauty, spirituality, and trauma through contemporary spaces like bus stops and downtown skylines.

The novel utilizes a 'chorus of voices' to explore the tension between stories that free and stories that trap. Characters like Dene Oxendene, who documents the city's gentrification from a drone's perspective, and Edwin Black, who grapples with the 'double-blind' of Indigenous art, confront how Native identity is often flattened by stereotypes. Orange emphasises the 'ambiguously nonwhite' reality, depicting individuals grappling with 'both and neither' identities—haunted by a cleansed history of genocide that persists as a 'pull of a wound that never quite healed.'

To mirror these intricacies, the book's layout toggles across first, second, and third-person viewpoints, creating a feeling of 'inevitability' and shared links. While some critics have debated the novel's non-fictional prologue regarding historical oppression, the core of the work remains a study of survival. It asks what it means to be of a place and a people when the land is everywhere or nowhere, and how one maintains authenticity in a world that often demands a simplified, 'fake' version of heritage.

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