‘Present-Tense People’: (Re-) Writing the Native in Tommy Orange's There There
‘Present-Tense People’: (Re-) Writing the Native in Tommy Orange's There There

Summary/Abstract: There There, Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange’s first novel, has been praised as "an astonishing literary debut" (Margaret Atwood), a "tense, prismatic book" (New York Times), a "breathtaking, haunting and gripping story" (Publishers Weekly), and has received multiple literary awards since its publication in 2018. This article explores Tommy Orange’s way of writing the Indian (back) into presence, in response to a “metaphorical,” as well as very “material” (Arif Dirlik) deletion of the “inconvenient Indian” (Thomas King) along centuries of American history. The discussion focuses on Tommy Orange’s understanding of storytelling as a way of continuing “Indian Wars” (E. Cook-Lynn) with the pen. Storytelling is a revisionist act in that it implicitly denies the stereotype of the vanishing race and re-places the Indigenous American not in a(n impossible) pre-colonial past, but in the land with which the Native has never ceased to remain connected. The characters’ stories, some in an autobiographical tone, others in the third person, narrate the Natives as “a present-tense people” (TT 141), grappling with a traumatic, far-from-romanticized past and present, but all the more alive for that.

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