Read this. Don't try to analyse it yet. Just read it.
Don't believe the reports of our demise. We are alive. We are still here. We have not disappeared. The movement and migration of our people across continents, across oceans, continues. Our story is not over. We are not a relic. We are not a museum piece.
We did not move to cities to die. The Federal Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was supposed to be the end of us. We were given one-way tickets to cities all over the country. We were supposed to disappear into the white noise of the American city. We didn't.
But the problem with the word urban — with the idea of the urban Indian — is that the city is not typically the first thing that comes to mind when people picture Native people. We are supposed to be out there, in the somewhere else, on land, in nature, in the past. The cities are not supposed to be ours. The land the cities were built on is. That's the thing about being Indian in this country.
Before any kind of movement or migration, there was already something like an urban Indian in each of us. The land is everywhere and we are on it, in it. And we carry our city in us wherever we go.
Orange opens his novel with a prologue that is not a prologue. It is a statement of existence. It was necessary to write it because the default assumption — built into film, television, textbooks, theme parks, Halloween costumes, sports mascots, and the physical design of American cities — is that Native people are gone.
The title of the book comes from Gertrude Stein writing about Oakland, California, where Orange grew up: "There is no there there." A white woman describing a city as empty. A city built on land with people already in it.
During the Cold War, American children were taught to hide under their desks in case of nuclear attack. This was called a Duck and Cover drill. It was known to be useless. It was performed anyway, because performing it communicated something: that the threat was real, that the government was responding, that there was something you could do.
The myth of the vanishing Indian is a different kind of test. It is not a drill. It is a story told so often, in so many forms, that it stops being visible as a story. It becomes the way things are.
Name something you have seen so many times you stopped seeing it.
Look again.