We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest. . . . we ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.

The title of Tommy Orange’s novel There There is a reference to Gertrude Stein’s 1937 book Everybody’s Autobiography. Stein writes in this book that she tried to visit her childhood home in Oakland, but the rural landscape she had remembered was gone, and she reflects, “There is no there there.” Orange writes in the prologue that, like Stein, Urban Indians have found that there is no “there” to return to: their homelands were taken from them generations ago. However, unlike Stein, they are not seeking to return to a home that no longer exists: having been born in the cities, they are as much at home there as they would be in their ancestors’ homelands, or even more so.

The spider’s web is a home and a trap.

When she is struggling to fight the temptation to break her sobriety streak and consume alcohol, Jacquie remembers her mother saying this to her throughout her childhood. Jacquie interprets the line in her present scenario: the pleasure she would take from drinking would be “home,” but the consequences of it are the “trap.” Many of the characters in this book experience sensations of pride and belonging at the powwow, feeling “at home” in their Native American identities. However, certain characters, such as Opal, have come to associate Native American culture with the trauma they have endured in their lifetimes. In the end, Native American culture, represented by the powwow, becomes a trap, as many characters are killed or gravely injured while there. Through all this, Orange implies that while Native American culture was once and often is a “home” for its people, the centuries’ worth of trauma received from white people throughout history have made it a sort of trap as well. 

She told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories.

The concept of storytelling is significant in There There, both in the individual characters’ lives and in the novel’s format. When Opal is young, her mother tells her that storytelling is one of the ways to honor her people. Opal’s mother and other Native Americans symbolize the persecution they have endured from white society by living in prison cells on Alcatraz; through their demonstration, they tell the story of their people’s oppression and demand social change. In a broader context, There There as a whole is a series of stories and “stories about stories.” Through the character of Dene, for example, Orange tells the story of a documentary filmmaker who is himself telling the stories of Urban Indians. If storytelling is a way to honor one’s people, then Orange has done just that by narrating the persecution Native Americans have faced from the seventeenth century until the present day, as well as the impact it has had—and continues to have—on their lives.