Colonel Chivington danced with dismembered parts of us in his hands, with women’s pubic hair, drunk, he danced and the crowd gathered there before him was all the worse for cheering and laughing along with him.” They took our body parts as trophies and displayed them on a stage in downtown Denver. They broke soft baby heads against trees. They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies, they ripped them out of our bellies. We hid in the hollows of tree trunks, buried ourselves in sand by the riverbank. Broke our fingers to take our rings, cut off our ears to take our silver, scalped us for our hair. Tommy Orange tells us, vividly and without holding back: We’ve not only destroyed the luminous Native people, broken their families, homes, and hopes, but we’ve also sneered at their thousands upon thousands of years of intelligence of how to live with the land in harmony, dignity, and respect. We are learning to face that in these two hundred and forty five short years of “democracy” which has been a cover for an extraction-of-resources-no matter-the-cost-and-make-as-much-money-as-possible policy now leaves this bounteous land teetering. Many of us are terrified of each other and possible contagion, divided against one another too, and also reckoning with the reality of ecological devastation with species going extinct, fertility rates dropping, cancer deaths rising, and poisoned land and waterways.
It doesn’t help that this has been a particularly brutal year of hard lessons. Tommy Orange, through his tremendous gift as a writer, held up a mirror and said, “This is the story of concentrated and focused genocide.” We knew this, of course, we’ve always known this, but his remarkable method of “on the body” and “voice driven narrative” drove the lessons in that much deeper.
Our time together was of such potency and power, I decided to write up a few thoughts. We’ve wrapped three weeks on this book, and I’ve taught nine classes with about thirty writers, examining the novel from nearly every craft perspective possible: Plot, voice, POV, and structure while asking through teacherly questions like: Can we find a hero in a book with twelve characters? Can we find a plot from the deck of plots we study? Is there a structure that adheres to the three part form?īut this was also a teaching that needed to stretch us beyond our usual course of analysis and dig into ourselves as members of a society who have benefitted from the genocide of the Native people of this land.
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