"Everything I did in the book that’s related to modern technology and contemporary behavior had to do with revisiting the idea of the historical monolithic Native American that everyone thinks of, and that ... the only real way to be a real Native American is to be historical or have a headdress or look this one way. It’s deeply damaging to a people to not have a dynamic range of ways to be that are still acceptable as Native. One of the common experiences of being a Native is to be questioned, like: Are you enough? So I wanted it to feel very contemporary and now."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
On reshaping antiquated notions of what it means to be a Native American in “Author Interview: Tommy Orange” in Cowboys & Indians (2019 Jul 24)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tommy_Orange
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange (born January 19, 1982) is an American novelist and a writer from Oakland, California. His first book There There was one of the finalists for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.
10 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Tommy Orange →
Related Quotes
"The initial impulse was just liking it in other books. … Also, coming from a community that felt voiceless in the lar…"
"I wanted to write characters that felt true and real, and there’s a lot of harrowing detail about the lives of Native…"
"In Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, she talks about how someone was asking her what it’s like to come back to her c…"
"We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls. We know…"
"They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we were intended to be, our children before they were children, bab…"
"Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are someth…"
"Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins. Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then o…"
"You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you’d st…"
"There are some extraordinary people working right now and there are scenes in literary fiction being published that I…"
"Would you end war? Create great Peace."