Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Open Campus and republished here with permission.
All we got right now are reservation stories, and shitty versions from outdated history textbooks. A lot of us live in cities now. This is just supposed to be like a way to start telling this other story.
—Tommy Orange, “There There”
A dozen women thumbed through paperback copies of There There, with its bright orange and yellow cover, in a college classroom at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon. They went around the table sharing their thoughts on Tommy Orange’s 2018 Pulitzer-nominated novel, which follows a cast of characters whose lives ultimately intersect at a powwow in Oakland, California.
For Erin Juge, this was more than a reading assignment; it was an attempt to better understand her Native identity. She referenced a passage where Orange, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, describes how powwows draw Native Americans from across the country, with families traveling in caravans, station wagons, and the backs of Ford Broncos. They come from reservations and cities, from pueblos and urban centers, because, as Orange wrote, “we made powwows because we needed a place to be together.”
When Juge read about the powwow caravans, she saw not just a cultural gathering but a metaphor for her own journey to connect with her heritage. “I really liked how the book was talking about how people come from far and wide to celebrate the coming together of our people,” said Juge, who is enrolled Fort Peck Assiniboine. “It really made me think of when I was younger, and I was trying to find my place in the world. When my mom took me to my first powwow, I didn’t feel like I fit in there.”
That’s the kind of connection Carma Corcoran, an adjunct professor at Portland State University and an enrolled citizen of the Chippewa Cree Nation, hoped her students would make when she chose Orange’s novel for her Indigenous literature course. Corcoran said was drawn to Orange’s authentic storytelling, which vividly portrays the challenges urban Natives face as they navigate complex identities.
Corcoran isn’t a typical literature professor. Her research focuses on the growing numbers of Native American women in prison and how traditional ways of knowing and healing could help break the cycle of incarceration. Teaching Indigenous literature to incarcerated women is a natural extension of her work examining how incarceration interrupts women’s lives, she said.
A new kind of history
The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind of history.
—Tommy Orange, “There There”
Corcoran said she’s teaching a class in “truth telling.”
For the women in the class who identify as Native American, the class is an opportunity to learn things about their culture and history they may not know, Corcoran said. For non-Native students, it provides a deeper understanding of Indigenous experiences and perspectives both at home and globally.
The class, part of Portland State’s bachelor’s degree program at Coffee Creek, is one of a series of humanities classes the college has developed focused on Indigenous, African American and Chicanx/Latinx literature supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For Corcoran, this kind of curriculum is essential in prison education; incarceration profoundly impacts her students’ sense of identity. “At the end of the day, we all want to know who we are,” she said.
Scholars looking at Indigenous practices in prisons have found that some Native people encounter their culture, language, and history for the first time in prison. They are exposed to cultural traditions such as sweat lodges and powwows, often organized by prisoner-led groups, that were inaccessible to them on the outside. Many younger Native people in prison belong to a generation whose parents, having experienced the trauma of boarding schools, were discouraged from or prevented from passing down their languages and cultural practices.
Sasha Womack said she previously understood the legacy of colonization and the appropriation of Indigenous lands, but reading the novel gave her a new perspective on contemporary Native life. As a Black transgender woman, Womack says identity-based literature helps students explore their own complex experiences and intersection identities.
“When we’re learning from books exploring different cultures, whether that’s Black studies, or Chicanx literature, or now Indigenous literature, it changes your perspective on just how malleable and dynamic identity is,” she said. “It really puts you at the center of the transformation. Even if it’s fiction, you can still see the potential in all these lives and stories shared. And you begin to wonder where your story fits in.”
The memories we don’t remember
We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.
—Tommy Orange, “There There”
One character in There There who sparked particular discussion was Blue, a young woman adopted and raised by white parents in the Oakland hills. In the novel, Blue doesn’t learn her birth mother’s name or Cheyenne heritage until her eighteenth birthday. Her story of adoption and cultural disconnection resonated with the class.
One student described having a roommate at Coffee Creek who had the same background as Blue: “She didn’t get to know her Native side until she got here [to prison]. So I really identified with that character.”
Juge was also able to connect the book to what she was learning in her cultural anthropology class about intergenerational trauma and family structure. She said she used Orange’s book to write a paper for her anthropology class looking at extended family structures and kinship ties in Native communities, where older siblings often become caregivers to their younger brothers and sisters.
The novel’s themes about family history and inherited struggles also resonated with scientific concepts she was studying about how trauma can be passed down through generations.
“Understanding and learning more about the intergenerational trauma of Indigenous people helps me better understand where my struggles with mental health and addiction originated from,” she said.
Through Orange’s book, students experience a reminder of who they are and where they come from—even as they navigate the confines of prison life. Like many of Orange’s characters, Juge grew up in an urban area, disconnected from her Native heritage. The book’s narrative also reflects on how storytelling – and truth telling – can be a path forward.
“The best way to learn is from stories,” she said. “Not only am I learning, I’m also healing.”