“They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten.”
— Tommy Orange.
Mesa and Kildow
In the United States the legacies of racial injustice that have existed for centuries are finally becoming recognized by society. The history of radical racism in America is a shameful and long one. Because of our horrific past, many minorities have had their identities and histories erased and continue to live with the everlasting effects of historical trauma. Their past has failed to be acknowledged, resulting in the forgetting and avoidance of tragedies, a disconnect from the past and further marginalization in communities that need the most outreach.
Tommy Orange’s 2018 novel There, There: A Novel is an exploration of the persisting pathological effects of centuries of racial degradation against Native Americans. It opens with a seething essay that details a history of enduring genocide and its current desensitization: on televisions across the US from up until the late 70s “there was . . . The Indian Head test pattern. If you left the TV on, you’d hear a tone at 440 hertz . . . and you’d see that Indian, surrounded by circles that looked like sites through riflescopes. There was what looked like a bull’s-eye in the middle of the screen… The Indian’s head was just above the bull’s-eye, like all you’d need to do was nod up in agreement to set sights on the target”(Orange 3-4). A rather modern example of this sanitization of genocide, which is juxtaposed to the atrocities of the historical past, is the murder of Massasoit, a Wampanoag chief, over a land-deal feast that ended in the ‘spontaneous’ deaths of 200 natives. Another example is the murder, drawing, quartering and beheading of his son, Metacomet, whose body parts were tied to trees for birds to feed on and head was sold to Plymouth colony for a mere 30 shillings —“the going rate for an Indian head at the time,”(Orange 4) — put on a spike, carried through town, and displayed at Plymouth Fort for the next 25 years.
The infamous Thanksgiving feasts that would become an observed national holiday were really celebrations of successful massacres. Whether it was in the past or in the present, “the Indian head in the jar, the Indian head on a spike were like flags flown, to be seen, cast broadly. Just like the Indian Head test pattern was broadcast to sleeping Americans” (Orange 5-6) to drum in the image of the defeated and deceased Indian and desensitize us to his plight. Through the entangled lives of the subjects of his novel, Orange is telling our story — defining us when “we’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered… All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image” (Orange 7). As contemporary Native Americans, we are ultimately lost. Our sense of identity is murky and erased. The old ways have been eroded by years of racist legislation geared towards our elimination and assimilation. In our current era, we are seen as expendable, an obstacle to be eliminated and set up to fail by the larger government. When compared nationally to our counterparts, we are a statistical nightmare. However, in reality, it’s much worse. In my generations of Natives, we have at best, a hazy past to look back at and an uncertain future before us; in the present, the bloody legacy of subjugation leaves its remnants for us to pull ourselves through: poverty, alcoholism, exile, isolation, erasure, violence, unemployment, depression, murder and suicide. When we ask ourselves what it means to be an ‘Indian’, some come up empty handed, others see a heritage they want to explore, and for some still, pride is stained with shame. Often, as such a small minority though consisting of hundreds of tribes and bands, we’re lumped together under the same tired old static stereotype of obsolescence. It is this caricature that Orange artfully obliterates through his novels wide cast. It gives our generation the hope to look beyond the status quo of irrelevance and uselessness that this nation has set up for us. We aren’t “citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples . . . But what we are is what our ancestors did. How they survived. We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel.” (Orange 10) Even amidst the dizzying waves of urban life, we’ve found each other and set down roots. We refuse to be drowned out, we refuse to be quietly snuffed out, we continue to leave our mark wherever we go in any way we can so that we never disappear.
A memorial dedicated to African Americans that were victims of enslavement, lynching, and Jim Crow has finally been made by founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson. The EJI is about defending minorities, ending mass incarceration and challenging racial and economic injustice. The memorial Stevenson created through the EJI, called “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice,” is the first ever memorial made for the African Americans who suffered through the worst phrase of our history. Bryan Stevenson also wrote a book called Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. According to an Amazon biography, the novel is about “the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice.” Bryan Stevenson, due to this novel, memorial, and many other social advocacy acts, has a reputation for standing up for those that are hardly ever stood up for, searching out justice for his ancestors and current people of color that are stuck in the world’s current prejudices. The fact that this is the first ever memorial dedicated to these tortured souls but we shamefully have multiple Confederate memorials is unaccounted for, and if more of the public knew about this they would be infuriated. We should have been on this years ago, but racism still lives among us, and thankfully Stevenson made a move. EJI believes the first step of working towards reconciliation is “publicly confronting the truth about our history” (par. 10). With a history this nasty, how could we not confront it? Racial issues are still prevalent in today’s society, and if we are unable to even acknowledge our faults in white history, how could we ever move on? How could African Americans ever move on when their parents, grandparents, and every other ancestor is a victim of some sort of prejudice, whether extreme or not? White people went out and literally hunted African-Americans, causing psychological wounds for the entire community. These acts were completely tolerated by the states, yet were an act of terrorism. The past cannot be ignored, and this memorial will finally acknowledge the African Americans of the past that were victims.
The author, Tommy Orange, himself struggles with the authenticity of his identity; born to a Cheyenne father and white mother who denounced his father’s beliefs when she converted to Evangelical Christianity. In a sense, the character of Thomas, an alcoholic who recently lost his job as a janitor, is an inclusion of Orange’s own biographical struggle. He writes You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You’re both and neither. In the bath, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub”(Orange, “The State”). Internally there is a juxtaposition between the colonizer and the colonized, the centuries of conflict and eradication coalesced and reconciled in one person. But how can you reconcile? Are you one, the other, neither and both? Orange wanted to create a narrative in which characters struggled like he did. In addition, as a Native American raised in Oakland, California, living in urbanity, and for many others, these areas represent memories that have been buried and white washed under industrial complexes.
Stevenson is a widely proclaimed lawyer in the United States known for fighting for the rights of minorities. He has won multiple cases in the United States Supreme Court, along with multiple awards for all the work he has done. In Stevenson’s memoir, a New York Times bestseller, he met an African American man who was an inmate on death row in a prison in Georgia. He did not have a lawyer, and this infuriated Stevenson. The idea that people of color could be capitally punished without a chance to even have their case reviewed with a law professional in the room sank in his heart, causing him to take all the initiatives he does. In the book, he said he always knew what to dedicate his life to, which are the things he was already made witness of: “the lives of the poor, America’s history of racial inequality, and the struggle to be equitable and fair with one another” (Stevenson 4). The move he made in providing a memorial for those who lost their lives to the evil history of radical America shows his true compassion. Stevenson wrote about this topic in a book and created a memorial simply because it is his passion. Helping those that are hardly helped by anyone else is what he dedicates his life to.
Both the memorial created by Bryan Stevenson and Tommy Orange’s novel There, There: a Novel address the erasure and sweeping under the rug of the violent historical past these two different minorities have dealt with. African Americans suffered through years of trauma and the negligence of their basic human rights as Native Americans were also horrifically treated in such a way by our history, and what do we have to stand for it? Both groups are still suffering trauma from history and neither are hardly acknowledged. Another connection is that because these traumas are not being acknowledged, both men were extremely motivated to bring them to the light. Both men have the passion to point out the flaws in their being no admittance of the past wrongs. They both have dedicated themselves to bringing these issues to the forefront of the public sphere through their lives work. Stevenson’s memorial has two parts: one section is a museum for the public to walk through that contains square stones hanging from the ceiling. Each stone has the county in which victims were lynched, followed by all of the victims names. On the outside of the building there are identical stones laid out for the public to also look at, but these ones are meant to be picked up by the county that has their name on it. Each county is intended to pick up their stone and create a memorial in their area dedicated to the victims of lynching that happened in their own areas, acknowledging their awful past.
Similar to Stevenson trying to get more areas to acknowledge their horrific past, Tommy Orange is trying to get people to acknowledge and hear the gritty truth behind the very inception of this country. In choosing to open his novel with an essay, he addresses the earliest grievances revealing how they have been sugar-coated and waxed over by the government, educational institutions and society at large. Colonialism is the vehicle through which the indigenous people of this hemisphere have been forgotten and reduced to static caricatures. We’re the only group that’s expected to remain unchanged; and we make up such a small minority that our voices our drowned out in the public sphere; this novel is the come to Jesus moment that this country, and all those in the new world, desperately need because men like Hatüey, a Taino cacique who led the first stand against colonialism in the New World when he led a group of men against invading Spaniards and was burnt at the stake upon capture in Yara, Bayamo, Cuba, and Sitting Bull didn’t die in vain.
Works Cited
“Bryan Stevenson.” EJI, Equal Justice Initiative, eji.org/bryan-stevenson.
Charles, Ron. “What does it mean to be Native American? A new novel offers a bracing answer.” The Washington Post. 29 May 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/what-does-it-mean-to-be-native-american-a-new-novel-offers-a-bracing-answer/2018/05/29/a508d0ba-6289-11e8-a768-ed043e33f1dc_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.08900419d566
McGee, Celia. “REVIEW: A Spectacular New Novel that wants Native Americans to be Seen.” The National Book Review. N.d. https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2018/6/1/review-a-novel-that-wants-native-americans-to-be-seen
Orange, Tommy. “The State”. The New Yorker. 26 March 2018
Orange, Tommy. “There, There: A Novel.”First Edition. Knopf. 2018, Amazon.com https://www.amazon.com/There-novel-Tommy-Orange/dp/0525520376
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel and Grau , 2014.
“The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.” EJI, Equal Justice Initiative, 2018, museumandmemorial.eji.org/memorial.
Toibin, Colm. “Yes, Tommy Orange’s New Novel is Really that Good.”The New York Times. 19 June 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/books/review/tommy-orange-there-there.html
Mesa Meditations 