Path lost, discussing There There

Path Lost

By Jamie Harper

I have to admit to struggling with this week’s read, as I experienced a lot of negative reactions to the underlying river of entitled masculinity that poured through the entirety of the narrative, from the predominantly male characters, to the misogynistic infantilization of the first female character introduced, and the re-connection of the second with her own rapist. All of which, to me, smacked of the influence of the white toxic masculinity, and how it has corroded the original ideals of Native cultures. In learning of the novel’s premise, I was initially enthused about reading a Native story about a variety of Native people, but was quickly let down upon beginning part one. The characters felt to me as if hitting the one note of the stereotypical “Indian,” just in slightly different amorphous forms of that feathered head Orange mentions in his prologue (p. 3). As I repeated in our last craft class, while trauma is an important topic and a part of life, it is not all that some groups of people experience. Women do not only experience sexual assault, Natives do not only experience substance abuse. There are other aspects to their lives, that are just as, if not more, important. And while I feel Orange had an excellent opportunity to show that, he chose to focus on the more “palatable” image of Natives that White people know best, the Tragic Indian.

The most hopeful characters in this narrative are Dene and Orvil, the two young adults seeking reconnection with the ancestry they never really knew, after growing up with adults who never really taught them. Something I identify deeply with, and wished was present more in this novel. But beyond these two boys, there is no true hope presented for the other characters, as if implying the future, and heritage, belongs only to the young and to the male. Both of which go against traditional Native norms (and this is not the first or only instance of this, as Bill also condemns “Gender fluid” attire, when Natives are amongst the first cultures to have recognized non-binary identities). It makes me wonder if Orange was, like most of his characters, heavily impacted by the White-man’s Disease and guessing at what it means to be Native, but rather than trying out different identities, experiences, and arc strategies for his characters, kept close to the gentrified version of a Native identity as built off the White ideal.  

From a craft perspective, this flatness of character building and character representation does not sting as much as from my personal perspective, but it does frustrate. Nine out of twelve characters are male, almost as many have issues with substance abuse, and save for any slang used by the younger characters, much of the dialogue carries the same tone and pacing in my reading, leading to the majority of this huge cast feeling interchangeable for me. I also tried to track the use of language placing us within the Native body, like the description of how Tony’s face “heats up and hardens like it’s made of metal” (p.17), as both a means of character development and Native representation/exploration, but after the first few chapters found any such descriptions lacking (which was surprising to me considering this book was originally on our reading list for our craft of the body class last semester). Perhaps the most interesting thing I noted in the craft of this narrative was Orange’s use of repetition and rephrasing throughout the entire novel, such as seen in his opening line on Page three.  “There was an Indian head, the head of an Indian, the drawing of the head of a headdressed, long-haired Indian depicted...” This specific line reminded me of many Tribe’s traditional storytelling techniques, as well as the opening line in Thoreau’s Walden, in which Thoreau places his reader firmly in the location of his experimental self isolation from modern society. This, combined with the line on page eight about Indians belonging to the city, which belongs to the earth, gave me hope for an almost transcendentalist approach to Native spirituality and the world, but this too was quickly lost.

I suppose my feelings about this book are that it reflects a Native experience tainted by the White patriarchy as to become almost unrecognizable beyond stereotype, too far removed to tradition to be called Native other than Natives are the ones predominantly experiencing it. Which perhaps is Orange’s intent, and brings air again to the question of representation in media and how this affects real life representation and archetypes. What does it say about the literary world, and the world at large, that this novel, with its specific type of representation, is considered the new “it” Native novel?