There There is a Pullitzer-nominated novel by Tommy Orange published in 2018. The multivocal narrative explores contemporary urban Native life in Oakland, culminating in a beautifully narrated and powerful scene of gun violence at a powwow. Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, draws upon his own experiences as an Indigenous and mixed race person to defy stereotypes about Native people that exclusively place them in the space of Reservations or as static, tragic figures of the distant past. Oakland itself might be considered a main character in the novel, as the story flies through the lives of a variety of nuanced characters and across time via flashbacks. The novel is broken up with non-fiction essays that meditate on the relationship between Indigenous people and the city, history and memory, survival and identity, trauma and love. 

Orange’s characters grapple with their cultural and racial identity in relation to the history of settler colonialism. Their interconnectedness is as powerful as the gaps and silences into which coincidence, spirituality, and struggle flow. This curriculum unit explores the text from both literary and historical perspectives, inviting students to consider how their own identities have been shaped by history, power, and storytelling.

Big Ideas

• Contemporary indigenous stories are complex and multi-faceted: there is no single way to be Native today. 

• Indigenous Americans are “present-tense people” (Orange). 

• While our birth imparts certain aspects of our identities, identity is formed as we grow in community with others. 

• American Indian or Native American tribal (or nation) identity today includes a complex set of factors, including family heritage, experience, and enrollment status. 

• Both stories and trauma can be passed down through generations.

• Music, art, and literature can all work together to tell stories, resist oppression, and inspire activism. 

• We live in a settler-colonial state, predicated on the U.S. national myth that all Native people have been murdered or assimilated. 

• Gun violence is an urgent problem today, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, that we can work together to change.