Tommy Orange's There, There
The promotion of inaccurate and racist stereotypes by the media is something that Tommy Orange must grapple with when considering the portrayal of his many characters in the novel and their respective storylines. This, of course, is the definition of an autoethnography: Orange is taking into account the public’s knowledge and perception of Native Americans and writing his own novel in a manner that responds to known stereotypes.
In his novel, There, There, Tommy Orange both acknowledges and combats the inaccurate narratives and portrayals of indigenous communities that I discussed on the previous page. The main way he does this is by representing indigenous people as modern, contemporary, and living in urban areas like cities, which is a representation of native americans not typically found in media and one that serves to disrupt the widely inaccurate assumption that native peoples still follow the same kind of lifestyle as they did in the 18th and 19th centuries. Indigenous people are not a statistic or a historical image, but a “present-tense people.” Orange aims to humanize indigenous peoples and their stories, sharing in an interview with Hannah Beckerman that “writing a polyphonic, multigenerational novel is resisting this one idea of what being Native is supposed to look like. If we all have to be historical, with a headdress, looking off into the distance, that’s hopeless as far as building a proper, complex, human identity” (Vlaicu 2). Orange has an arsenal of complex characters with intricate storylines in his novel. His characters are impacted by struggles faced by many Native Americans today, such as “separation from family, marginalization, or the lack of a sense of identity” (Vlaicu 6), and Orange truly takes the time in his novel to flesh out the historical and colonial roots of such issues.
Furthermore, it is clear from the very beginning of the novel that Orange is aware of stereotypes concerning indigenous people, which is indicative of the novel’s autoethnographic nature. The prologue’s first few sentences are ones that directly acknowledge such representations. Orange writes, “There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of the head of a headdressed, long haired Indian depicted, drawn by an unknown artist in 1939, broadcast until the last 1970s to American TVs everywhere after all the shows ran out. It’s called the Indian Head test pattern…There was what looked like a bull’s eye in the middle of the screen, with numbers like coordinates. The Indian’s head was just above the bull’s eye, like all you’d need to do was nod up in agreement to set the sights on the target. This was just a test” (Orange 3). Orange continues on, taking the opportunity to use practically the entire prologue to offer an interpretation of American history from an indigenous perspective, writing, “We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered….we have it in our heads, Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne’s six-shooter slaying us…We have all the logos and mascots. The copy of a copy of the image of an Indian in a textbook. All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image” (Orange 7). Orange uses this image of the Indian head to show his audience that he understands how native americans are painted in media and how such portrayals impact public opinion. Hand in hand with a history of conflict, removal, and assimilation, Indigenous peoples have been continually defined as “savage,” objectified, and erased, which is why Orange’s novel is so powerful: he is able to give a voice to a community that historically has been denied one, and convey to his readers the deep complexity of an indigenous identity.