Finding a voice

There There. By Tommy Orange.Knopf; 294 pages; $ 25.95. Harvill Secker; £14.99.

WHAT does it mean to be an American Indian? The phrase itself is an absurd misnomer. Yet America’s natives often prefer it to politer tags—such as Native American—in part because it helps them answer that question. To be an American Indian is not only to descend from the people encountered by European colonisers, in possession of a continent they themselves had settled over 10,000 years before. It is also to be shaped by the calamities that followed: dispossession and genocide, the forcible break-up of families and the mass substance abuse, incarceration and poverty that still blight America’s misnamed indigenous people today.

That history creates a paradox with which native intellectuals and cultural revivalists have been wrestling at least since the Indian civil-rights movement of the 1970s. To celebrate Indianness…Continue reading
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