Community Read Challenge 4

1. Read pp.197-290, and engage with other readers by sharing your comments and reflections. Some questions to think about as you read
   • Many of the chapters in this section are very short. Think about the impact of brevity on readers and characters as we near the climatic events of the powwow. In what ways have we been prepared for this through earlier chapters? In what ways are we unprepared?
   • What is the significance of the quote from Jean Genet that opens “Part IV: Powwow”: “A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness”? (p. 227)
   • How do characters reflect on Dene’s question “What does being Indian mean to them?” (p. 240)
   • Calvin says about his involvement in the plan to steal the contents of the safe, “he couldn’t get over it. But he couldn’t get out of it either” (p. 248). In what ways do other characters share a sense of inevitability?
   • With the fate of multiple characters left up in the air, meditate on Opal’s ability to find “the place where her old teddy bear, Two Shoes, used to speak from . . . ” in order to unseal something she “thought she’d closed off forever a long time ago” (p. 285).
   • Once you finish the novel, think about what aspects are most impactful. How does Orange capture the complexity of the urban Native community and put the “there there” back in Oakland?
2. Attend a panel discussion of There There by Native American students at Chico State, February 25, 2:30 p.m. (Zoom Meeting ID 872 6110 4904, Passcode 270908).
3. Watch a recording of Dr. Caitlin Keliiaa’s outstanding Book in Common presentation from last semester: “There There: Exploring Urban Indian Community & History.”
4. Attend the Tommy Orange conversation at Laxson Auditorium on March 1, facilitated by Chico State faculty Dr. Browning Neddeau (Citizen Potawatomi Nation, School of Education and Department of Multicultural and Gender Studies) and Dr. Laura Nice (Book in Common coordinator). 

This week’s Community Read Challenge features a talk by Dr. Caitlin Keliiaa.

Dr. Caitlin Keliiaa is an assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an Indigenous feminist historian, and her scholarship engages Indian labor exploitation, dispossession, and surveillance of Native bodies especially in Native Californian contexts. Her book project, Unsettling Domesticity, centers Native women’s voices uncovered from federal archives. She is Yerington Paiute and Washoe, and her tribal communities inform her scholarship.

In last semester’s Book in Common presentation, Dr. Keliiaa explains that "people I think who are born and raised in the Bay Area, particularly in Oakland, they know this book like they know a friend because the environment that Tommy Orange has really written, I think, is so very real and tangible, and you feel like you know it so well."

Keliiaa also discusses the following quote from There There that: "Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours." (p. 8): “I go back to that paragraph and those sentences repeatedly. Because when I think about this history that I research and when I think about that statement I completely wholeheartedly agree. The city is very much my home, and it's where I was born and raised. . . . As a Native person growing up in the Bay Area and someone who identifies as an Urban Indian person, it felt very cool to finally see representation and to be able to see our stories being told."