Native American Author Tommy Orange Feels A 'Burden To Set The Record Straight'
In his debut novel, There There, Orange explores what it means to be an urban Indian. He says, "Native people look like a lot of different things. ... And we just need a new story to build from."
Every year at BookExpo, the publishing industry's annual conference, a few books emerge as front-runners in the competition for readers. This year, There There by Tommy Orange is one of those books. Set in Oakland, Calif., it explores the lives of Native Americans who live in cities, not reservations — lives like that of its author, who himself grew up in Oakland.
Orange's mother is white, and his father is Cheyenne. As a kid, Orange wasn't much of a reader. But after graduating from college with a degree in sound engineering, he couldn't find work, so he got a job at bookstore where he developed a passion for reading.
"I was in my 20s and also searching for meaning," he says. "And I wasn't a reader, so fiction was a super
