In the prologue of his novel There, There, Tommy Orange makes an observation:
“We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people… Our heads were on the penny first, of course, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before we could even vote as a people—which, like the truth of what happened in history all over the world, and like all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation (Orange 7).”
The description of the Indian cent and the buffalo nickel as “out of circulation” does not simply refer to currency, but to Native American identity in its current form. When something goes out of circulation, it can sometimes become more valuable or highly sought out; however, the more common and tragic reality is that these things become entirely forgotten and abandoned. And because the history and the culture have been buried so much, pushed so far into corners and reservations and small watered-down sections of textbooks, Native American identity becomes functionally extinct: so little is left to hold onto that the Native communities, and societal understanding of both the history and current affairs, may never recover.
Through one way or another, these characters are disconnected from their heritage, and many struggle to overcome other personal hardships such as addiction or abuse alongside this search for an identity that ultimately cannot be found in its purest, original form. But in the case of Orvil, he is even totally forbidden from that attempted connection by his great aunt Opal because of the unspecified risks of “Indianing” (Orange 118). Opal tells Orvil, “Learning about your heritage is a privilege. A privilege we don’t have. And anyway, anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian (Orange 119),” but Orvil understands that being Indian and feeling Indian are not the same thing. Orvil understands that one cannot have heritage without personal identity, and one way he searches for that identity is through the internet, through watching Youtube videos of powwow dance and learning.
But when it comes time to dance, Orvil still feels like a “fraud,” unsure if he has successfully made the connection (Orange 232). Even when the dance begins, when his nerves have calmed and he sees, “They’re all one dance,” there is a sense that he will always be searching for something more, just as the performance ends and he searches for his brothers (Orange 233). He will always be looking for the Indian cent and the buffalo nickel—for the signs that his identity can and does exist within this heritage, if that heritage can still be found.
I love your analysis about the Native identity “going out of circulation”. But even further to the point, like the money aspect, the idea of their identity was commercialized until those “mainstream” forms of commercialization and exploitation were deemed non-profitable, so they casted them to the side.
ReplyDeleteEven though I thought about your “going out of circulation” point, I never thought that Orvil looking for his identity is like looking for the coin, for signs of him being Native. But now thinking back on it, it makes so much sense.
I think another interesting connection to the coins is the powwow itself. Orvil states to Lony, as he questions what the point even is of going, that they got to carry on the old ways or “they might disappear” (131). If we continue the coin analogy, Orvil feels that the powwow will be his coin, or is one of the coins anyways. This event is to carry on the memories of the old ways, ones that he never got to experience. He will be finding the coin for the first time.
I feel like even if he gets the coin, he won’t be satisfied and will always be collecting them like one isn’t proof enough. You brought up the fact that Orvil feels like a fraud, but also he feels that he (along with many others) needed to “dress up to look Indian” and that he had a fight between his heart and his nerves (232). Even though this was his “journey” in the novel, he has to collect even more experiences within his Native identity in order to fully believe they belong to him.