The Native American Novel That Belongs in the Canon

Tommy Orange portrayed people from my home town in his novel without ever having met them. A feat which is especially remarkable considering that his story is set in Oakland, California and I am from Kodiak Island, Alaska.

Orange’s first novel details the ways in which twelve native peoples of Oakland have worn and carried their traditions in the cultural maelstrom of California, so it would seem that his story can’t be divorced from its setting, from its specific There. Yet somehow, Orange’s story feels like could be anywhere — or at least anywhere there is a community of mixed peoples defying erosion from the West.

I am not implying that diverse native cultures or stories of oppression are interchangeable. They are not. However, I feel that Orange’s characters and their stories are more relatable than that of Tom Joad or Ponyboy or even Scout Finch. Orange wove the stories of twelve unique characters together to tell a larger story of survival. Their relatable cultural conflicts and the ubiquity of human experience represented in their stories beg for this novel to join the canon.

I know these people. I can open my Facebook page and easily point my finger at a Jacquie Red Feather, a Calvin Johnson, and especially an Octavio Gomez. They are tangible members of many communities.

Literature lovers, and especially English teachers, cling to the canonical novels that we learned to love as young adults. We repeat their significance into being and wax plaintively about the universality of the classic themes. We teach our children and our students about the necessity of reading the classics. We hope that the guarded and apologetic discussions of race and class in these novels of the past are enough to produce productive conversations today, but instead, they fall flat. Those canonical characters aren’t sitting in classrooms.

Those characters don’t exist anywhere except in the abused paperback copies of high school and university libraries that are branded with checkout stamps dating back to the ’80s and beyond.

I have no desire to teach Huck Finn and drudge through the old debate of whether to err in retaining the language of the oppressor or to cave-in to censorship. That conversation, that energy is simply not worth spending when there exists inclusive novels that question current issues in voices that I recognize. I love Gatsby with every inked page of my heart, but many of my students don’t. They don’t get how anyone can be unhappy with that much money, and why should I ask them to ponder something so out of reach for so many Americans?(Perhaps that’s the point of Gatsby, but postmodern Gen Z simply doesn’t care.)

I was always taught that the truest test of a canonical text was its ability to withstand time. The classics that we grew up with held their significance for many years, but their characters don’t know anything about cultural appropriation or political movements generated online. Students can’t turn to those texts for answers or for better questions.

If we use stories to teach about the human experience, then those stories need to represent real humans in the midst of intersectionality.

The There twice referenced in the title of Orange’s novel may have grounded his text, given roots to its setting, but the people in his story make There anywhere that we breathe each other’s air.

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Previously published on “Equality Includes You”, a Medium publication.

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