'Writing out of a loneliness,' novelist explores the range of native experiences — Transcript

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1. 0:00JUDY WOODRUFF: Now look at a novel that has received much attention in recent months written
2. 0:04by Native American author Tommy Orange.
3. 0:06It sheds light on a group of people long stereotype and often ignored.
4. 0:12And again to Jeffrey Brown, who traveled to Oakland California, for the latest from our
5. 0:16"NewsHour" Bookshelf.
6. 0:18JEFFREY BROWN: Dimond Park in Oakland, California, Tommy Orange spent hours here as a kid and
7. 0:26now visits with his wife and son.
8. 0:29He grew up down the street, the child of a white mother and Native American father.
9. 0:34TOMMY ORANGE, Author, "There There": Sometimes, you feel like you belong right in the skin
10. 0:37that you have, and sometimes you feel like an alien, and all the different spaces between.
11. 0:42JEFFREY BROWN: Orange's acclaimed debut, "There There," is a novel of voices, a dozen characters
12. 0:49exploring what it means to be Native American in an urban setting, not on a reservation.
13. 0:54TOMMY ORANGE: I wanted to have the range of experiences for these Native characters, so
14. 1:00different ages in different contexts, and different struggles and backgrounds, various
15. 1:07different proximities to their Native identity.
16. 1:11Some struggle with it and some don't.
17. 1:12So I wanted to have a range of what it means to be Native right now.
18. 1:17JEFFREY BROWN: For 36-year-old Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho
19. 1:23tribes, his Native identity came mostly through visits to his father's childhood home in Oklahoma.
20. 1:31Back in Oakland, identity was more fluid, even concerning what an Indian is supposed
21. 1:36to look like.
22. 1:37TOMMY ORANGE: If I'm in the Fruitvale, like we are now, people will speak Spanish to me
23. 1:41first.
24. 1:42JEFFREY BROWN: Yes, in this part of town.
25. 1:44TOMMY ORANGE: Yes.
26. 1:45In high school, I was called racial slurs.
27. 1:46JEFFREY BROWN: Racial slurs for Indian...
28. 1:49TOMMY ORANGE: It was actually Chinese racial slurs in high school.
29. 1:53JEFFREY BROWN: Oh, really?
30. 1:54TOMMY ORANGE: Yes.
31. 1:55JEFFREY BROWN: You were taken as Asian?
32. 1:56TOMMY ORANGE: Yes.
33. 1:57JEFFREY BROWN: Wow.
34. 1:58TOMMY ORANGE: So it's -- I have been thought to be a lot of different things because I
35. 2:01have ambiguity.
36. 2:02JEFFREY BROWN: If slurs are thrown at you about being Chinese, what's your reaction
37. 2:09to that?
38. 2:10TOMMY ORANGE: Well, I got pretty angry.
39. 2:11But it was also confusing.
40. 2:15It's like, you can't even be made fun of right.
41. 2:18(LAUGHTER)
42. 2:19JEFFREY BROWN: After graduating from college, Orange worked in a variety of jobs, including
43. 2:25here at Oakland's Native American Health Center.
44. 2:29Returning with us recently, he was now a local celebrity.
45. 2:33He became a reader late, he told me, and wasn't satisfied with the monolithic image of Natives
46. 2:39he found.
47. 2:40TOMMY ORANGE: When people think the only way to be Native or the only way to look Native
48. 2:45is based on a historical, head-dressed feathered image, you have already disappeared -- you're
49. 2:50already gone before you can even start.
50. 2:52There's something powerful about seeing yourself on the page or on the screen.
51. 2:57And we don't have very much a good, positive version of that.
52. 3:02Native people have -- we have a lot of stereotypes that we battle against or negative ideas that
53. 3:06we're dumb or we're drunk or -- so, I was sort of writing out of a loneliness.
54. 3:13JEFFREY BROWN: What came out is being widely praised as an important new voice in American
55. 3:18literature.
56. 3:19TOMMY ORANGE: "We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant
57. 3:23trains better than wolf howls.
58. 3:26We know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell
59. 3:31of cedar or sage or even frybread.
60. 3:34We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains.
61. 3:41Being Indian has never been about returning to the land.
62. 3:45The land is everywhere or nowhere."
63. 3:47JEFFREY BROWN: One of the characters in "There There," 14-year-old Orvil Red Feather, explores
64. 3:53his Indian heritage by looking online and watching videos on YouTube, a contemporary
65. 4:00way to learn what it means to be Native, and something Orange himself turned to for research.
66. 4:05TOMMY ORANGE: In an urban setting, if you're not tapped into the community and you're not
67. 4:10going to powwows, and, you know, for some of us, our parents weren't forthright about
68. 4:17the history or our culture or our tribe, sometimes because of pain.
69. 4:23So there's still that curiosity.
70. 4:26And what better place is there than the Internet if you're curious?
71. 4:30JEFFREY BROWN: A powwow, in fact, becomes the destination that finally connects Orange's
72. 4:36characters.
73. 4:38He patterned it on real ones, large intertribal gatherings, like this in Albuquerque, New
74. 4:44Mexico.
75. 4:45TOMMY ORANGE: It's intertribal.
76. 4:46It's contemporary and traditional.
77. 4:47JEFFREY BROWN: But he set his fictional powwow at the Oakland Coliseum, where he'd attended
78. 4:53ball games in his youth.
79. 4:54TOMMY ORANGE: You have a bunch of people coming together to dance and to sing and to drum.
80. 4:59And there's an aliveness to being Native that you can feel there.
81. 5:02I have my characters reflecting on like how to be Indian.
82. 5:05How do you do it now?
83. 5:06What does that mean?
84. 5:07What does that mean if you live in the city?
85. 5:09JEFFREY BROWN: Orange studied and now teaches at the influential Institute of American Indian
86. 5:15Arts in Santa Fe, and he's just one among a new generation of writers and poets telling
87. 5:21a new Native story.
88. 5:23The goal now, he says, for himself and other writers, to sustain the momentum they're building
89. 5:30and to keep telling stories.
90. 5:31TOMMY ORANGE: Well, one of the functions of literature that I admire is when you can read
91. 5:37like an intimate detail that a writer writes about, and you have this feeling, like, oh,
92. 5:40my God, I didn't know anybody else thought like that or did that.
93. 5:44I want to be able to keep doing it and support my family and help other Native writers at
94. 5:49the program that I teach in to get their work out in the world.
95. 5:53JEFFREY BROWN: For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Oakland, California.