everywhere or nowhere

from there there by tommy orange

"in 1621, colonists invited massasoit, the chief of the wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. massasoit came with ninety of his men. that meal is why we still eat a meal together in november. celebrate it as a nation. but that wasn't a thanksgiving meal. it was a land-deal meal. two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. two hundred indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison. . .

in 1637, anywhere from four to seven hundred pequot gathered for their annual green corn dance. colonists surrounded their village, set it on fire, and shot any pequot who tried to escape. the next day the massachusetts bay colony had a feast in celebration, and the governor declared it a day of thanksgiving. thanksgivings like these happened everywhere, whenever there were what we have to call 'successful massacres.' at one such celebration in manhattan, people were said to have celebrated by kicking the heads of pequot people through the streets like soccer balls."

"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. but the city made us new, and we made it ours. we didn't get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. we found one another, started up indian centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. we bought and rented homes, slept on the streets, under freeways; we went to school, joined the armed forces, populated indian bars in the fruitvale in oakland and in the mission in san francisco. we lived in boxcar villages in richmond. we made art and we made babies and we made way for our people to go back and forth between reservation and city. we did not move to cities to die. the sidewalks and streets, the concrete, absorbed our heaviness. the glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses -- the city took us in. we were not urban indians then. this was part of the indian relocation act, which was part of the indian termination policy, which was and is exactly what it sounds like. make them look and act like us. become us. and so disappear. but it wasn't just like that. plenty of us came by choice, to start over, to make money, or for a new experience. some of us came to cities to escape the reservation. we stayed after fighting in the second world war. after vietnam too. we stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can't leave a war once you've been, you can only keep it at bay -- which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets. the quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.

plenty of us are urban now. if not because we live in cities, then because we live on the internet. inside the high-rise of multiple browser windows. they used to call us sidewalk indians. called us citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples."

"urban indians were the generation born in the city. we've been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. an urban indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. all our relations. the process that brings anything to its current form - chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise - doesn't make the product not a product of the living earth. buildings, freeways, care -- are those not of the earth? were they shipped in from mars, the moon? is it because they're processed, manufactured, or that we handle them? are we so different? were we at one time not something else entirely, homo sapiens, single-celled organisms, space dust, unidentifiable pre-bang quantum theory? cities form in the same way as galaxies. urban indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. 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 know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread -- which isn't traditional, like reservations aren't traditional, but nothing is original, everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. everything is new and doomed. 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."

"'how can i not know today your face tomorrow, the face that is there already or is being forged beneath the face you show me or beneath the mask you are wearing, and which you will only show me when i am least expecting it?' - javier marías"

"one time she used the word devastating after i finished reading a passage from her favorite author - louise erdrich. it was something about how life will break you. how that's the reason we're here, and to go sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples fall and pile around you, wasting all that sweetness."