MAY JUNE 2018 | MOTHER JONES 65ARTCREDIT TK
this “fallow period” during a Fresh Air interview last year. After
reading one chapter of Orange’s book, he emailed his writer
friends to say, “It’s here. That book I’ve been waiting for.”
Orange, who calls himself a “timid, shy guy,” has deep brown
eyes and a smattering of freckles. His white mother comes
from a longtime Bay Area family. His father, raised in Okla-
homa, is a member of the state’s Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.
Dad is a “walking stereotype,” Orange says. He has long hair,
and when they were growing up he made his children listen
to “peyote tapes”—recordings of Native American Church
songs Orange only later came to love. Orange remembers “a
lot of fighting at home” as his parents’ marriage dissolved, and
brawling in high school with kids who called him Chinese.
After getting a college degree in sound engineering, he couldn’t
find relevant work, so he took a gig at a used bookstore in San
Leandro. That’s when “I fell head over heels” for literature, he
says, starting with Franz Kaka and Jorge Luis Borges. “I always
felt like I was playing catch-up, so I got obsessive about how
much reading and writing I was doing.”
It was around the same time that Orange began opening
his eyes to his heritage. He spent eight years working on and
off at Oakland’s Native American Health Center, eventually
creating a media lab there. When his dad was diagnosed
with stage 4 lymphoma and decided to treat it with tradi-
tional Native healing methods, Orange joined him in New
Mexico for the ceremonies. “That was the turning point for
me,” Orange says. “I learned about who I am and what I
come from.” (His father, he adds, is alive and cancer-free.)
The concept for There There came along in 2010, as
Orange was driving down to Los Angeles for a concert.
He’d just learned his wife was pregnant, and he was think-
ing it was time to get serious with his writing. And then
“the thing just popped into my head; the whole thing felt
right there,” he recalls, curling his wide hand into a fist.
“It was somehow getting everybody to this powwow.” He
spent the next six years honing his characters, includingThomas Frank, a bumbling janitor whose “one thousand
percent Indian” father was modeled on Orange’s dad, and
Orvil Red Feather, who secretly dons his grandmother’s tribal
regalia to practice TV dance moves in the mirror.
In 2014, Orange enrolled in an mfa program at the In-
stitute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
a first-of-its-kind writing course whose instructors are
mostly of indigenous descent; he teaches there now. His
thesis reader, Pam Houston, author of the story collection
Cowboys Are My Weakness, describes Orange as “more than a
good student—he’s a deeply soulful man who makes every-
one around him want to try harder, do better, without him
seeming to say or do anything at all.” Classmates included
Terese Mailhot, whose lauded 2018 memoir, Heart Berries,
sold within weeks of There There.
After a stop for lunch near the lake, Orange leads me to an old
haunt, the Intertribal Friendship House, one of the first com-
munity centers geared toward urban Native Americans. We’re
greeted by 22-year-old program manager Javier Patty, who, with
Orange’s mentoring, edited a film about relocation. Patty, a
member of the Muscogee Creek and Seminole tribes, tells me
he dreams of working at Google as he shows me a greenhouse
where the nonprofit grows onions and cabbage used for food
events, such as an upcoming “precolonial” dinner.
Orange sits down with the center’s director, Carol
Wahpepah, with whom he keeps in touch. She asks for photos
of his six-year-old son. He then presents her with an early UK
edition of There There, whose cover depicts a painted feather
surrounded by a pattern of droplets. “Carol, let me tell you
what they tried to get on here—a headdress!” Orange says.
“Oh, no!” she says. They shake their heads and laugh.
“It was really sweet to be able to hand-deliver my book to
Carol,” Orange tells me as we make our way back toward the
lake. There There is fiction, but he sees it as filling a blank in the
historical ledger. “I’m super happy I can at least be one voice
saying, ‘No, but wait—there’s this, too.’” —Maddie OatmanTHE ART
OF WAR
It’s hard to convince
Americans to care about war
in a faraway land, which is
what makes Brothers of the
Gun so remarkable. Out May
15, this brave, honest memoir
by Marwan Hisham, who
comes of age as his Syrian
homeland descends into
chaos, is made all the more
relatable by collaborator
Molly Crabapple, whose ink
illustrations imbue Hisham’s
story with a deeper sense of
urgency—and heartbreak.