![]() He tells us the story of Chief Metacomet, who is beheaded, dismembered, fed to the birds, his head put on a spike, his hand in a jar of rum. ![]() Orange transforms the “test” head into flesh by recounting known beheadings and other vicious murders and violations of Native bodies. A bull’s-eye sat below the bodiless head, reinforcing the trope of Native American as target. ![]() The prologue opens with “There was an Indian head,” pausing on a comma just long enough for the reader to fill in the image with their own preconceptions before the language is inverted to the possessive “the head of an Indian” and then adorned as “the head of a headdressed, long-haired Indian.” By the end of the opening sentence, we discover that Orange is echoing the repetition of the Indian test pattern, a disembodied image of a Native person’s head broadcast across America each time a station went off-line from 1939 into the 1970s. ![]() Through repetition and leaps through history, Orange establishes the bloody origins of mascots and other appropriated and warped symbols employed to dehumanize Native peoples in the wake of genocide. First, however, its lyrical prologue situates us. ![]() Tommy Orange’s There There, the California Book Club choice for November, moves between a dozen points of view as it follows a group of Native people to the fictional Big Oakland Powwow. ![]()
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