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Dene Oxendene is a young Native American man who is hoping to carry out his late uncle Lucas’s mission of documenting the stories of the Native community living in Oakland, California. After Lucas’s death, Dene inherits his uncle’s video camera. Through the lens of the camera, Dene discovers a new form of perception—he can objectively record truth and experience without corrupting it with his presence. He first makes this discovery on the day of Lucas’s death, when he secretly films his mother crying. Dene chooses to look away from the intimate moment but allows the camera to capture it in its entirety, simultaneously giving his mother privacy while still documenting her experience and pain. In his adulthood, he uses a similar approach for his project, opting to exit the room during interviews and leave his subjects alone with the camera. Dene understands that, as a documentarian, he has an ethical obligation to provide his subjects with respect, privacy, and safety. At the same time however, he also understands that truthfully and unflinchingly capturing their lives and experiences is of vital importance if the Native community—and America at large—is to remember, pass down, and give credence to their stories and identities.
Like many of the characters in the novel, Dene understands the importance of stories. There There excavates the ways in which stories hold power over every aspect of our lives, from our personal identities to the inner machinations of our most powerful systems. The stories that have been told about Native Americans have often been, at best, stereotypical and incomplete, and, at worst, ignorant, revisionist, and white supremacist. All these stories have come together to create an inaccurate picture of Native American life, which both Natives and non-Natives internalize. By paying individuals in Oakland’s Native community to tell their raw, unmanipulated, and spontaneous stories, Dene hopes that he can construct a different picture that might challenge predominant narratives surrounding Native Americans. The project is especially important in that it gives voice to urban Natives, who are even less represented in media than Natives living on reservations. In some ways, the novel’s construction—a brief, loosely woven tale of 12 different Natives, all vaguely related to each other—mirrors Dene’s interview project. In this sense, it could be argued that Dene’s character is an authorial self-insert: both Dene and Orange collect Native stories and empower Natives to claim their identities through story.
