Characters in There There

 

There There by Tommy Orange is a story that gives the spotlight to many complex characters that are all going through/suffering through different things, yet their struggles with their Native identity links them all together.

              The book starts off with the “Prologue” which gives a factual, yet heart-wrenching recount of Native history in the United States, and everything that they went through, focusing on the violence, mass killings, and forced migrations that the Natives went through (which unfortunately is most of their history post-colonization). Although I am Mestizo, as a Mexican, I was pleased that Orange included Mexicans, “Mexicans before they were Mexicans. Before Spain came,” in his group of natives and people that have been marginalized, because a lot of people forget that (some) “Mexicans” are “native” too (some may disagree, but at this point is it incredibly hard to differentiate between “different types of Mexicans”/what percentage of whatever they are) (Orange, 7). Orange also stresses the “urban native,” who are a generation of Indians who were born in the city. All of the characters introduced so far are “urban natives,” none of them were born in their reservations.

The character's relationships with their Native identity are different for each character, yet not a single one of them, in the first part at least, (Tony, Dene, Opal Viola, and Edwin) is externally proud of their identity. The struggle to claim their identity is especially seen with Edwin Black, who is biracial, half white, and half native. The reason why Edwin struggles with his identity so much too is that he was raised by his white mother and never met his native father. Due to this, he purposefully goes out of his way to learn more and immerse himself more into “his” culture, because he feels separated from it. Although he wants to be outwardly proud of his culture and be more of a part of it, he doesn’t even know if he’s “allowed” to do so because he didn’t grow up knowing or being an internal part of the community.

Other characters as well, deal with things that are known to heavily affect the native community specifically, such as alcohol/drug abuse. Native Americans have a higher risk of alcohol abuse than the general U.S. population and the effects of this can be seen with Tony, for example, who was born with FAS. He also sells drugs with Octavio. Dene’s uncle Lucas was also heavily affected by alcohol, and he ended up dying because of his alcohol abuse. Throughout the first part of the book as well, like during Opal Viola’s story, she mentions that many of the native people in Alcatraz drank, or got drunk to deal with their situation.

As the story progresses, it will be interesting to see how Orange manages to keep breaking the stereotypes placed on the native community and see how he uses sarcasm and irony to help his goal of doing so.