Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > There There

I re-read this book - which itself was shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist - following the long listing of its prequel/sequel for the 2024 Booker Prize.

I would strongly recommend interleaving the two books in the order:
Part 1 Wandering Stat, There There, Part 2 Wandering Star.

We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid - tied to the back of everything we’d been done no to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been coming from years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided blessed and cursed.

This astonishing debut novel draws its power and authenticity from the author’s own experiences but is told in a polyphonic series of interleaved third (and occasionally first) person point of view chapters chronicling the interlinking lives of a group of Urban Indians / Natives that eventually intersect explosively and tragically at a newly inaugurated powwow at the Oakland Raiders baseball stadium in California.

We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work towards, for our jewellery, our songs, our dances, our drum. We kept powwowing because there aren’t many places where we get to be all together, where we get to see and hear each other.

The stories title is taken from Gertrude Stein’s often misunderstood quote about Oakland – “There is no there there” – which simply referred to the fact that her hometown has changed beyond recognition – a theme which the author adopts on behalf of Native people given how much the US has changed from the country owned by and taken from their ancestors.

Through the stories we read of the inevitable multigenerational curse of addiction (particularly alcohol) Natives after a “five hundred-year-old genocidal campaign” and how a new urban generation is attempting to reclaim its identity – to understand what it means to belong, what is home, what it means to be Native and also for many what it means to also be White.

Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure .... But the city made us new and we made it ours

We first meet Tony Loneman - whose foetal alcohol syndrome drives him into drug dealing and finds himself pulled against his will into a plan, hatched by the main dealer Octavio Gomez, to rob the powwow’s prize money using laser printed guns (made by Daniel Gonzales – who flies a drone over the powwow) - along with a number of other characters including Calvin Johnson (on the powwow’s organising committee – a committee that the author also was on).

Dene Oxdene, a graffiti artist. vows to take on the never started project of his uncle (who dies from alcoholism) to give documentary space for Oakland Natives to tell their story and who in his pitch for a grant effectively pitches the book we are reading (not least as the author himself acknowledges at the book’s end that he received a grant for “a story telling project that never came to fruition – except for in fiction – i.e. in a chapter of this novel”)

“I want to bring something new to the vision of the Native experience as seen on the screen. We haven’t seen the Urban Indian story. What we’ve seen is full of the kind of stereotypes that are the reason no one is interested in the Native story in general …..it’s too sad, so sad it can’t even be entertaining .. but more importantly because of the way its portrayed it looks pathetic …. [but] the individual people and stories you come across are not pathetic or weak or in need of pity, and there is real passion there and rage”

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield attends the powwow surreptitiously to watch Orvil Red Feather one of her three adopted nephews (the orphaned grandchildren of her sister) compete in the dancing, a skill he has (in turn) surreptitiously taught himself from YouTube as a way of embracing his identity.

Her long distant sister Jacqui Red Feather was raped as a minor in the short lived Native camp on Alcatraz but is confronted by her past in unexpected ways at and after a conference for Native addiction counsellors (which features a hugely affecting polemic by another speaker on the plague of suicide – the author himself having been part of a Native suicide prevention programme).

Kids are jumping out of windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping … We’ve boarded up the windows and made better nets to catch them, found more convincing ways to tell them not to jump. They’re making the decision that it’s better to be dead and gone than to be alive in what we have here, this life, the one we made for them, they one they’ve inherited

Edwin Black, struggling with obesity and internet addiction, motivates himself to join the organising committee of the powwow (held at the stadium where his step father Bill Davies has worked for years) as an intern when he discovers via Facebook that his Native birth father is the MC and he can finally understand his full identity.

For how many years I had been dying to find out what the other half of me was. How many tribes had I made up when I asked in the meantime. I’d gotten through four years as a Native America studies major. Dissecting tribal histories, looking for some signs, something that might resemble me, something that sounded familiar …. I wrote my thesis on the inevitable influence of blood quantum politics on modern Native identity … All without knowing my tribe. Every possible way I think that it might look for me to say I’m Native seems wrong

His boss Blue (who found out when she was eighteen that she had been given up at birth by her Native mother for adoption) is fleeing an abusive partner and has her own unexpected family reunion at the fair.

Thomas Frank has lost his job as a janitor at the Oakland Indian Centre (where the author worked for eight years) through drinking, struggles with his mixed race inheritance ( “You’re from a people that took and took and took and took. And from a people taken” ) but finds himself in big drumming.

These stories are introduced by a Prologue and include an Interlude (effectively in the author’s own voice) which powerfully contextualise much of the story (and provided many of my quotes)

This is a fierce and forceful story telling a story which for me at least has been hitherto invisible if not suppressed from literary fiction. If there is a weakness to the book it is perhaps in the heavily foreshadowed events at the powwow itself.

I think however this is a vital and essential novel, one surely destined to win literary awards but more importantly one that should and will sear consciences, and challenge our complacent, received view of history

If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you’ve learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning or clinging to little inflatable rafts .....

If you were fortunate enough to be born with into a family whose ancestors benefited directly from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive not to find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger.

Opening this book is to wake the tiger.