CHRIS KOPACZ
Indian Country Today

The much-anticipated sequel to author Tommy Orange’s acclaimed first novel, “There There,” will take readers to places they may not have gone before.

The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, the rise of Indian boarding schools and the mind of Richard Henry Pratt, who coined the phrase, “Kill the Indian, save the man,” will chart the links between history and the characters from his first novel.

“The same brutal stuff is there,” Orange told Indian Country Today in a recent interview. “I'm trying to make that world feel alive in a fictional way.”

The still-untitled new novel, set for likely release in late 2022, will reunite with the characters from “There There” following the aftermath of the first novel’s powwow finale.

Orange, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations of Oklahoma, understands that history brings meaning to modern life.

The visceral prologue to “There There” recounts the Sand Creek Massacre in Colorado and other horrors of colonization, yet looks ahead to the lives of urban Natives flourishing beyond the agenda of elimination.

“We didn’t get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic,” he writes. “We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork.”

The new novel is inspired by Orange’s research about America’s earliest boarding schools and Pratt, the Army general and superintendent who opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was the first government-run Indian boarding school and became a prototype for more than 450 boarding schools that eventually opened in the U.S.

Pratt started with a Native prison school in St. Augustine, Florida, at what was then Fort Marion, where he began experimenting with assimilationist education. It’s an ugly history that has resurfaced in recent months with the discovery of hundreds of bodies of mostly children at Indian boarding schools in Canada. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, citizen of New Mexico's Laguna Pueblo, has ordered a Federal Indian Boarding School Truth Initiative to review historic records of schools in the U.S.

“This particular history around Fort Marion and the origins of the boarding schools is a Southern Cheyenne story,” Orange said. “Half of the prisoners there were Southern Cheyenne. So, finding that out, it really made me want to dig in, and the more that I dug in, the more that it started taking over the novel.

“And not only that, but the way that it grew through time, starting around 1875, it started bumping into 1918, 1919, and then you had the Spanish Flu. And living in the pandemic of now made me want to write into that space, because it's too hard to write about the pandemic in the pandemic.”

‘Original and complex’

Orange, 39, spoke to Indian Country Today via Zoom from his home in central California, not long after receiving the biannual Festival of Words Writers Award for Native writers from the Tulsa City-County Library for “There There.”

The award was among a string of accolades Orange has received since the novel debuted in 2018, including the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the American Book Award and The New York Times Book Review’s “10 Best Books of the Year.” It was also a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.

The novel describes the search by urban Natives for a sense of belonging, told through the stories of 12 Indigenous people in various stages of life as they converge at a powwow in Oakland, California.

The title is drawn from a comment by author Gertrude Stein, who said that the Oakland where she grew up had changed so much that “there was no there there anymore.”

The book drew immediate acclaim.

“Nothing in Orange’s world is simple, least of all his characters and his sense of the relationship between history and the present. Instead, a great deal is subtle and uncertain in this original and complex novel,” The New York Times wrote in its review.

Orange took a winding path to being an acclaimed author. He grew up in Oakland to a Cheyenne/Arapaho father and white mother. In school he was an athlete, playing roller hockey on a national level. He then turned to music, getting a bachelor’s degree in recording engineering from a community college.

He developed a love for books and reading while working at a used bookstore. The real impetus for his novel, however, came with the birth of his son, Felix, in 2010.

“That really did a number on me, in terms of changing what I saw as my trajectory as a human and what did I care about, and how seriously was I going to take it,” he said. “It all kind of got kicked up a notch.”

He began the novel in 2012. In 2014, he joined the master of fine arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, earning his masters of fine arts degree in 2016. He said he found new challenges and rewards at the unique institute, which continues to make a name for its distinguished Native alumni and faculty, and its culturally distinct leadership within the arts.

“Most of all my experience at the MFA was about finding community,” he said, “meeting other Native writers and feeling like I’m part of a community of Native people who are trying to do this thing called, in my case, fiction.”

There, he says, the focus shifted from a more detached perspective to a community where people often challenged what he thought, and where he, in turn, could challenge what they thought. He learned from mentors, other students, weeklong residencies, professors in other genres delivering craft talks, and readings.

It was a challenge, though, “to both find the professors that I liked what they had to say about writing, and to suss out whose authority voice I didn’t really trust,” he said.

The connections Orange made through IAIA led him to an agent who helped bring the book to print with Alfred A. Knopf publishing.

His wife, Kateri, and son, Felix, now 10, stood by his side as he received the Tulsa award via Zoom from his home, and they helped wrap him in a ceremonial blanket that was presented to him.

A link to history

His sequel to “There There” will pick up the lives of the original characters in the aftermath of the powwow but will also deal heavily with the early history of Indian boarding schools.

It will begin differently than his first novel.

“It definitely doesn’t have a non-fiction tone,” he said. “For instance, I'm speaking from the character of Pratt.”

Orange said one of the characters he follows from the boarding schools will turn out to be related to Opal Viola, a character from “There There.” The book will then carry readers into the lives of the modern-day characters.

The historic part of the book will be much more extensive than the brief prologue for “There There,” in which the author details the slaughter by Cavalry soldiers of more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho, more than half of whom were women and children.