When Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, hit bookstores in the summer of 2018, the perception of Oakland was that of a city on the rise, featured in breakout films and hosting a parade downtown for the NBA champions the Golden State Warriors. Today, though, Oakland’s image has been tarnished by the loss of three major sports teams and a series of city hall scandals, including one in which former mayor Sheng Thao, who had been recalled in the fall, was federally indicted.
I imagine that for some East Bay residents, reading about Orange’s Oakland in 2025 feels like literary escapism, a dive into an affectionate depiction of the city they call home. After all, the book’s title comes from Gertrude Stein’s loving quote about her childhood home in Oakland, “There’s no there there,” which is often misinterpreted as a slight. But others will regard Orange’s presentation of Oakland as a warning that it’s somewhere to be avoided. His honest depiction contains both aspects, the ever-present chance to succeed or fail, symbolized perhaps by the lights of the city’s Tribune Tower, which he describes as “a faded pink glow that seems like it should be red but lost its steam somewhere along the way.”
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
In There There, the pride of being from Oakland and the pride of having tribal affiliation stand on equal footing. The novel takes place mostly in East Oakland, the 100-avenue-wide expanse east of Lake Merritt inhabited predominantly by communities of color. It’s from this base that Orange’s narrative reveals the complicated relationship that his characters—of Indigenous ancestry—have with the city, one another, and their own identities, as they prepare for the Big Oakland Powwow.
For instance, Thomas Frank, who will drum at the powwow, is the son of a white mother and an Indian father. He sees himself as a personification of “the idea to make it to California, for gold or bust.” As he rides the BART train from the underground section downtown to the elevated tracks in East Oakland on his way to the powwow, which is at the Oakland Coliseum, the trip offers Thomas a chance to examine his position in a world where there’s always a risk of being uprooted, where he has little control of his destiny, and where he has to fight to find and define home. Thomas reminisces about his family, divided by geography and addiction alike, and while staring out the train at 14th Avenue’s terminus near East 12th Street, he remembers his first powwow, in Berkeley, as a young boy.
Meanwhile, the three young Red Feather brothers, Orvil, Lony, and Loother, take a different route to the powwow. For them, Oakland is a treasure map of sorts, accessible by bicycle and effort. They pedal to every tourist fountain from Berkeley to San Leandro to Oakland’s Mormon temple to gather the coins tossed by people making wishes. They’ll use the coins to fund their own wish of attending the powwow.
The brothers’ movements slyly map Oakland and ingeniously reclaim spaces they know they can navigate—even if they must ditch their bikes in the bushes upon arrival at the powwow. Our wonder at the image of these kids riding bikes through the East Bay streets is juxtaposed against another character’s memory of a local mall being turned into a police station.
Like Thomas’s, Orvil’s journey to the powwow includes self-discovery. After he finds Indian regalia hidden in his great-aunt Opal’s closet, he secretly uses YouTube to learn traditional dances. Risking his great-aunt’s disapproval, he is determined to actualize himself as a dancer at the powwow. Orvil hadn’t seen himself as Indian until an EMT, caring for Orvil and his brothers’ possibly overdosing mother, identified the family as Native “just by looking at us.” He describes this moment to Dene Oxendene, a documentary filmmaker who later builds a small booth at the powwow to film and collect stories of urban Indians. Orange shows us how identity can be realized in California’s cities and how safe spaces like Dene’s storytelling booth, and the powwow itself, are critical to the telling of such stories.
The Big Oakland Powwow puts the characters—their personal, urban, and tribal histories and destinies—on a collision course. But outside the Coliseum’s gates, they instead smash into the city’s economic realities and desperate opportunism. Rather than union and harmony, violence and mayhem occur.
Orange’s novel holds sacred those spaces where security, even in tragedy, is found through community, within a city whose headlines often depict neither. Ultimately, There There positions Oakland as a place where dreams are created and, despite many odds, can still take flight.•
José Vadi is the author of Inter State: Essays from California and Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder’s Lens, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press. He lives and writes in California.
