There There Characters
There There is told from the viewpoints of twelve different characters. Some of the most important are Tony Loneman, Dene Oxendene, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, and Jacquie Red Feather.
- Tony Loneman is a young drug dealer born with fetal alcohol syndrome who initially plans to help rob the Big Oakland Powwow.
- Dene Oxendene is an aspiring filmmaker who attends the powwow in order to conduct interviews for a documentary on Urban Indians.
- Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield attends the powwow in order to see her grandson Orvil perform in the dance competition.
- Jacquie Red Feather, Opal's newly sober half-sister, unknowingly meets the daughter she gave up for adoption at the powwow.
Characters
Tommy Orange’s novel There There involves a cast of Native American characters whose lives intersect in the urban setting of Oakland, California. These characters struggle with a range of complex issues and backgrounds, and many of them narrate the events of the novel from their individual points of view.
Tony Loneman
Tony is the twenty-one-year-old Native American man whose narration both begins and ends the novel. Tony’s mother, who is in jail, is an alcoholic, and Tony suffers from symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome—or, as he calls it, “the Drome.” He now lives with his grandmother Maxine. He has a disfigured face, which he deeply resents, and “basically failed the intelligence test,” although a counselor he has seen for much of his life at the Indian Center assures him that he has a different type of intelligence: he is intuitive and street-smart.
Tony has been selling weed since the age of thirteen, although he became involved with the drug trade mostly by accident and kept up with it to help support his aging grandmother. Through his drug-dealing connections, Tony gets involved in the plot to rob the powwow: his job is to plant the bullets at the location of the powwow, come dressed in Native American regalia so that he will be harder to identify, and demand the cash. On his way to the powwow, Tony appreciates that people are staring at him for a new reason—his Native American clothing instead of his unusual facial features. Tony ultimately decides to not go through with the plan, refuses to demand the safe, and fires at Carlos and Charles during the shootout. He manages to tackle and kill Charles, and he dies in the end from gunshot wounds.
Dene Oxendene
Dene Oxendene, who is half Native American, is an aspiring documentary filmmaker. His goal is to use film to document the stories of Urban Indians, a project his uncle Lucas had thought of but had been unable to accomplish before his death.
Dene never seeks to put his own story on film; the fact that Dene used the graffiti tag “lens” symbolizes his dedication to giving others a voice and telling their stories. Dene is awarded a grant for his project and interviews Calvin Johnson for his documentary. He sets up a booth at the powwow to film more interviews and is startled to see Calvin as one of the shooters when the powwow turns to violence.
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield
Readers are first introduced to Opal when she is twelve years old. Because they face eviction from their house in Oakland, Opal, her mother, and her half-sister Jacquie move to Alcatraz Island during its period of Native occupation. Opal initially enjoys hanging out with Jacquie and following her mother around, but she becomes lonely and anxious when their mother develops cancer and Jacquie becomes involved with a bad crowd. When Jacquie becomes pregnant, Opal convinces her not to seek an abortion. After they leave the island and their mother dies, Opal and Jacquie are forced to flee from an abusive man named Ronald, a friend of their mother’s whom they had been living with. When Jacquie becomes unable to care for her grandchildren after her daughter’s suicide many years later, Opal adopts the boys. She views “Indianing” the boys as dangerous due to the trauma she has experienced related to her heritage, and as a result, she attempts to shield them from Native American culture. However, she attends the powwow when she realizes that Orvil is participating in the dance competition there.
Jacquie Red Feather
Jacquie is Opal’s half-sister and...
(This entire section contains 1936 words.)
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is older than her by six years. At Alcatraz, she falls in love with a boy named Harvey and becomes pregnant after he rapes her. She wants to have an abortion, but Opal convinces her not to, and she gives the daughter, later revealed to be Blue, up for adoption.
Years later, Jacquie’s daughter Jamie commits suicide, and Jacquie is unable to care for her three grandchildren due to her depression and alcoholism. She entrusts the boys to Opal and struggles to remain sober. At a conference for addicts in Albuquerque, she reconnects with Harvey, who invites her to attend the Big Oakland Powwow with him. She accepts, and they travel to Oakland together. At the powwow, Jacquie is introduced to Blue, the daughter she gave up for adoption so many years before; however, she does not realize their connection, and Blue is too nervous to inform her. When Orvil is shot at the powwow, Jacquie carries him to safety and accompanies him to the emergency room. She feels confident that he will recover because of a good omen she perceives.
Harvey
Though he is not one of the novel’s narrators, Harvey plays a significant role in its plot and in the lives of many other characters. On Alcatraz, he falls in love with, rapes, and impregnates Jacquie. He reconnects with her at a conference years later. After Jacquie describes the trauma he caused her, he takes responsibility for his actions, expresses regret, and invites Jacquie to the powwow (of which he is the emcee).
Harvey is Edwin Black’s father, though he does not realize this until Edwin reaches out to him through social media. He informs Edwin of his tribal heritage, which Edwin has been trying to identify his whole life—they are Cheyenne Indian. At the powwow with Jacquie, he meets Edwin and is introduced to Blue. Blue is also his daughter, but he does not realize their connection.
Orvil Red Feather
Orvil is fourteen years old and the eldest of Jacquie’s three grandsons. He was adopted by his great-aunt Opal and lives with her and his brothers, Lony and Loother. His mother, Jamie, committed suicide, and Jacquie was unable to care for them. Because he and his brothers are shielded from Native American culture by Opal, Orvil struggles to connect to his identity: he finds a ceremonial outfit in his grandmother’s closet, but when he tries it on, he fears he is wearing it incorrectly. Even though he feels disingenuous when he attempts to embody his Native American identity, Orvil perseveres and teaches himself Native American dance through internet videos. He enters the dance competition at the powwow and is inspired by the other dancers and the feeling of collectivity he experiences among them. He is shot at the powwow and taken to the emergency room by Jacquie and Opal, and it is implied that he will recover.
Edwin Black
Edwin Black, who is half Native American, lives with his mother, Karen, after earning a master’s degree in Native American literature. He struggles with internet addiction and obesity.
Edwin identifies and reaches out to his father, Harvey, through social media. Harvey informs him that he is Cheyenne Indian, and Edwin learns that Harvey will be the emcee of the Oakland powwow. At his mother’s urging, Edwin applies for and accepts an internship working with the powwow committee. He meets Blue there, who is later revealed to be his half-sister through Harvey, and works at the booth at the powwow that is later robbed at gunpoint.
Blue
Blue is a Cheyenne woman who was adopted and raised by white parents. Her adoptive mother told her the name of her biological mother—Jacquie Red Feather—when she turned eighteen, and Jacquie decided then to attempt to connect with her heritage. She began a job in Oklahoma with her tribe and developed a relationship with a man named Paul, whom she later married. Though Blue was able to connect to her heritage through Paul at first, he became abusive. She fled from Paul and returned home to Oakland.
Blue, now the Oakland Indian Center’s event coordinator, begins working with Edwin on the powwow committee. She urges him to speak to his father at the powwow, and he agrees; she is with him when he meets his father, Harvey, for the first time. When Blue and Edwin are introduced to Jacquie, Blue becomes nervous and runs away, having recognized Jacquie as her birth mother. Blue wonders if Harvey is her father, but as she does not speak to Jacquie about this in the novel, only the reader knows that she is correct and that she is actually Edwin’s half-sister.
Thomas Frank
Thomas Frank is an older man who previously worked as a janitor at the Oakland Indian Center. He struggles with alcoholism, having begun drinking as a young man to help alleviate the irritation caused by his eczema. He was fired from his job at the Indian Center because he was drunk at work, but he has been invited to perform at the powwow with the drumming group he joined during his time at the Center. He has conflicting feelings about his family: while he misses them now that his parents have split up, he struggled with his identity when he was younger due to the shame he felt toward his Native American father. He finds his identity contradictory because he is descended from both Native Americans, victims of white violence, and white people.
Calvin Johnson
Calvin lives with his sister Maggie and niece Sonny and is a committee member for the Oakland powwow. He owes money to his brother, Charles, who is a drug dealer, and is forced to visit Octavio with Charles and Charles’s friend Carlos. At the meeting, Calvin hears of Octavio’s plan to rob the powwow with 3-D printed guns, and though he doesn’t want to betray the people he works with, he feels he has no choice but to join their scheme. He informs them where the prize money is to be kept and attends the powwow with them as backup. Calvin watches the ensuing shootout when the group turns on itself out of greed, and he is shot twice before passing out.
Charles Johnson and Carlos
Charles and his friend Carlos—collectively referred to as “Charlos” by Octavio—are drug dealers who rope Charles’s brother Calvin into helping them rob the powwow. Charles and Carlos have lost money for Octavio and are therefore forced to help him in the robbery. When Octavio demands the prize money from Blue and Edwin, Carlos turns on him, demanding that he give them the money and drop his gun. In the ensuing shootout, Tony tackles Charles and shoots him. Carlos is knocked down by Daniel’s drone.
Octavio Gomez and Daniel Gonzales
Octavio and Daniel are cousins who bond through their mutual grief after the death of Manny, Daniel’s brother. Like Calvin, who owes money to Charles, and Charles, who owes money to Octavio, Octavio is in trouble with his superiors in the drug trade. The robbery of the powwow is Octavio’s desperate plan to pay off his debt. Daniel, a tech genius, manages to 3-D print guns and shows them to Octavio. Octavio pays him for the guns and promises to pay him more if their robbery is successful; Daniel purchases a drone with the money he initially receives.
On the day of the powwow, Octavio demands the prize money from Blue and Edwin at gunpoint after Tony refuses to do so. Charles and Carlos turn on him and demand the money, and Octavio and Charles shoot at each other. Daniel, present through his drone that he has been flying around the powwow, knocks Carlos down by crashing the drone into him.
