Digital Tribalography

Abstract

There there is so notable partly because it validates and documents the urban indian experience and complicates the back-to-the-land narratives of such classics as Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee): “Being Indian,” the narrator says, “has never been about returning to the land” (Orange 11). In place of this conventional narrative, There There embraces and authenticates the experience of Natives who have grown up in the city and are more at home there than in the countryside. Two key terms here need clarification already. First, we write “countryside” rather than “community” because Orange challenges the conventional opposition between urban Indians and those from “community,” as though community were the sole privilege of rural existence. In fact, Orange's novel locates community—all Native community—in the contemporary interpenetration of the urban and the technological. Second, for Orange the term urban doesn't just refer to those living in the city. Instead, the urban is a function of the contemporary world, in which access to the Internet effaces the place-based spatial logics that have long aligned authenticity with location in traditional—inevitably rural—settings: “Plenty of us are urban now. If not because we live in cities, then because we live on the internet” (9). The urban is connectedness in the midst of displacement, of the placelessness of online existence. Those who live in cities are ipso facto urban; those who do not are virtually urban, regardless of locale.