Sharing Stories: The Importance of Keeping Native Culture Alive in Tommy Orange’s There There
Traditional Native literature that still exists today is not as representative as one might think. Because of the language barrier between Native people and White colonisers, the material had to be examined and translated by White people to fit an English audience. Because of that, the image of ‘the Indian’ has come to lie in the hands of White people, and Natives have lost their authority over their own culture. However, because of the merging between Natives and Whites, Native people could regain their control over Native literature. Several authors have written Native literature that is representative of the Native culture and is addressed to an English-speaking audience, including Tommy Orange, who wrote his novel There There about twelve (part-) Native characters. Orange was able to write a representative work of Native literature because he is part Native himself and speaks English, and in his work, he emphasises the importance of sharing Native peoples’ stories through a critical essay in the prologue and one of the characters of the novel.
The Native American culture got erased when European colonisers came to America. They imagined it to be a new and untouched piece of the earth, with no inhabitants. When they realised that there were already people settled there, whom they mistakenly named ‘Indians’, they felt the need to erase these peoples’ culture so they could claim the land and take control of it. The first part of this erasure was considering the indigenous people as the ‘Other’, the infamous term coined by Edward Said in his work Orientalism: ‘An awareness of representations of the non-European as exotic or immoral ‘Other” was, according to Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, the first step in colonizing not only the land, but also the people settled on that land (196). The next step in the process of erasing the culture of the Native Americans was changing their culture so that it resembled that of the White settlers. Wiget, who researched how Native literature came about, wrote: ‘[Native people] became the object of intense acculturative efforts to transform them into the European’s image of himself’ (Wiget 44). Owens, who wrote on Native American culture and postcolonial theory, states:
‘America’s desire to control knowledge, to exclude the heterogeneous, and to assure a particular kind of being-in-the-world depends upon a total appropriation and internalization of this colonized space, and to achieve that end, America must make the heterogeneous Native somehow assimilable and concomitantly erasable’ (Owens 18).
In other words, the purpose of the European settlers was to completely get rid of all aspects of the Native culture.
As a result of the colonisation of White settlers in America, White people have always influenced Native literature. This is because the Native culture included a particular way of storytelling, which was known as the oral tradition: folktales, ballads, prose and poetry were shared through speech and song, from generation to generation. But when the Europeans came to America with their developed alphabet and writing style, Native stories were translated for an English audience. In his article ‘Translation and Mediation’, Murray claims that ‘in reading Native literature, we are always dealing with a process of mediation and translation’ (69). Native people needed the help of White, English-speaking people to translate and document their formerly orally transmitted tales on paper and consequently, White people gained power over Native literature. Murray remarks:
‘If we think of this oral tradition (…) as the original Indian culture, then it follows that anything we encounter as Indian literature is already some steps removed from this, in that it is in textualized form and is either translated or written by someone in English who is some distance from that tribal and oral situation’ (69).
Thus, there are two major factors at play here: firstly, the White translators who translated Native stories to English could ultimately decide what exactly happened in the story, because Native people could not check if they made any changes, and secondly, these White people were unfamiliar with the culture and thus the Native literature that they wrote was not totally representative. In summary, a lot of Native literature has been influenced by White settlers and is not completely representative and reliable.
Naturally, this resulted in unease amongst Indians, and Womack suggests that this unease with translation mainly lied with who has the power to dictate what is really Indian (65). However, over the years, Native Americans and Euro-Americans have merged and made generations of mixed-race children; among these people is Tommy Orange, who wrote a work of Native literature that is representative of current-day Natives and which is targeted towards an English-speaking audience. In his novel, Orange emphasises how important it is for others to know the stories of the Natives and to know what happened to them when the European colonisers came: ‘All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal’ (Orange 137). So, Orange wrote a novel in which he tells the stories of twelve (part-) Native characters and their families’ histories, to achieve exactly that goal: share these peoples’ stories. Orange was able to do so because there are no problems with mediation and translation for him: he is part Native, so his knowledge on the subject has been passed down from generation to generation and is therefore reliable, and he speaks English, so no White person had to interfere. Because there are generations of mixed-race children who have Native ancestors and thus a lot of knowledge, the Natives were able to take control of Native literature.
The prologue of There There is a critical essay about the history of Native Americans, and Orange tells the story of how Native Americans were persecuted at first, but found a way to stay close to their culture in cities. The essay begins with a description of some of the gruesome things that the European settlers did to the Native Americans throughout the years, and afterwards, Orange critiques the way in which Americans have made a stereotype out of ‘the Indian’. Although the first part of this prologue seems to give the reader a feeling of defeat, the tone quickly changes. Orange explains that Natives were moved to cities as the last step to ‘make them look and act like us. Become us. And so disappear’, but that this only encouraged them to stay true to their culture and grow their population (Orange 9). In fact, he claims that Native people are as familiar with cities as they are with the reservations they were so gruesomely removed from:
‘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 or even fry bread. (…) Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere’ (Orange 11).
Thus, among Urban Indians grew a feeling of solidarity and an urge to keep the culture alive.
This urge to keep celebrating the culture and sharing Native stories is reflected in one of There There’s characters named Dene Oxendene. He is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma (Orange 39), and he is taking over the work his uncle started, which is a project about Native Americans in Oakland and their stories:
‘What I want to do, is to document Indian stories in Oakland. I want to put a camera in front of them, video, audio, I’ll transcribe it while they talk if they want, let them write, every kind of story I can collect, let them tell their stories with no one else there, with no direction or manipulation or agenda. I want them to be able to say what they want.’ (Orange 40).
With this project, Dene wants to emphasise two things: firstly, how important it is for Native people to tell the stories about their families and what has been done to them, and secondly, that there should be no other party manipulating them so that they get the chance to talk with complete freedom. Dene’s project is an example of how modern-day technology helps spread Native people’s stories, and like Orange, Dene can make such a project because he stands close to the culture and does not need someone else to translate his work. In other words, there are no problems with translation or mediation with this project. So, not only did Orange write a novel about Native Americans and how important their history and stories are, but he puts even more emphasis on how important it is that these stories are heard by creating a character whose sole purpose it is to make a project and share those stories.
In conclusion, after the settlement of the European colonisers, White people interfered with Native literature. They had to translate the work, and because of that, it became less representative of the Native culture. White people are, after all, unfamiliar with the culture and tribal situations of Native Americans. However, through the years, White people and Native people came together and made a generation of mixed-race babies, who have both knowledge of the culture and can speak English; translation and mediation ware no longer necessary. One of the works of Native literature that came from this was Tommy Orange’s novel There There, which emphasises the need to share stories of Natives and their history, and does so with a critical essay in the prologue and through one of his characters, Dene Oxendene. Like Orange, Dene is also familiar with the culture and can speak English, and he emphasises the importance of Native peoples’ stories even more.
Works Cited
Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Fourth ed., Manchester University Press, 2017.
Bataille, Gretchen M. Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
Orange, Tommy. There There. London, 2018.
Murray, David. Translation and Mediation in Joy Porter and Kenneth M. Roemer, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Wiget, Andrew. Native American Literature. Twayne, 1985.
Womack, Craig S. Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Iris Elske 