“The whole country needs an update (on Native American realities) because we still think in the past tense,” Orange said. But what we are is what our ancestors did. An apple is red on the outside and white on the inside. Called us citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers. 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 deep wild forest. Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. But the city made us new, and we made it ours… “Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign.

The novel opens with an explosive prologue, a kind of 21st century urban Native manifesto, written, said Orange, “during a darker, angrier period in my life”: Orvil, however, “is trying to shake off the feeling of feeling like a fraud,” writes Orange, “like an Indian dressed up as an Indian,” having taught himself the ancient dance steps via YouTube videos.

Over coffee at a cafe on Telegraph Avenue, Orange, 36, said, “There are autobiographical elements in all the characters”: graffiti tagger Dene Oxendene, who is working the powwow to honor his uncle’s recent death 21-year-old Tony Loneman, who was born with “The Drome” (fetal alcohol syndrome) Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, who remembers the 1969 Indian Occupation of Alcatraz and is attending the powwow to watch her nephew, Orvil Red Feather, dance publicly for the first time in his feathered regalia. The characters express themselves with equal parts bravado and vulnerability, and all share to various degrees, said Orange, the hunger he once felt “for an authentic sense of what being Native means in the present tense,” when one’s inheritance is a tangle of both tribal pride and pent-up hurt over generations of trauma and loss.

Told through distinct episodic character studies, “There There” interweaves the stories of 12 contemporary American Indians whose lives converge in unexpected ways at a Big Oakland Powwow at the Coliseum - where bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lot say things like “Custer Had It Coming” and “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.” Buzzed about in the literary world ever since Orange’s manuscript set off a multiday bidding war among publishers (and stirred Hollywood interest) last year, the book has a restless, propulsive energy and has received widespread raves since its release this month.

There there book