Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

What does it mean to be a Native American—often invisible in the U.S. tapestry? Documentary filmmaker Dene Oxendene, one of a dozen characters whom we meet in this book, gives his take (based on Gertrude Stein's famous quote about Oakland, "There is no there there.") He says:: “This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.” Reminiscent in ways of the movie Crash, these characters—who eventually come together in the Big Oakland Powwow—crash into each other intermittently, leaving behind sadness and often scars. There’s Jacquie Red Feather, one of the characters we get to know the most, an alcoholic who is facing the tatters of her past and on her way to her future—finally meeting her three grandsons. Her daughter Blue, whom she never met (and who has given up those boys) is fleeing an abusive marriage. The oldest of the sons, Orvil, is pulling spider legs out of his own leg wound and wrestling about what it means to be Indian. And then there are the others —Danny who creates plastic guns on a 3D printer, Edwin who loses himself in overeating, Thomas who is half-white and floundering in his life. Tommy Orange’s purpose is clear; he wants us to know that the term “Native” cannot be easily defined and, in fact, encompasses many kinds of people who share the burden of alienation, isolation and cruel history. They come to the annual Big Oakland Powow for different reasons: “The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid—tied to the back of everything we’ve been doing all along to get us here…we’ve been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and hand-woven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed.” This is a major contribution to Urban Indian literature; I’ve never read anything quite like it. But it also defines all of us, as Americans, in many important ways. Tommy Orange has power to spare.