There There: Part I: Dene Oxendene (1) Summary & Analysis

Dene Oxendene walks up an out-of-order escalator at Oakland’s Fruitvale Station and sees a train starting to arrive—he feared he’d missed it. Dene is tired and out of breath, and wishes he had a cigarette that could “invigorate” him. He refuses to drink, but no other substances he’s tried make him feel any better. Dene studies the graffiti all over the tracks and thinks about the first time he saw someone tag, when he was much younger. He stared as another kid taking the same city bus as him wrote on the window, even though to stare at someone on an Oakland bus was—and still is—to ask for trouble. As the train pulls down the tracks, Dene fights the urge to throw himself in front of it.

Dene is on his way to face a “looming panel of judges” who will determine whether he is eligible for a cultural arts grant. Dene worries that appearing “ambiguously nonwhite”—not necessarily Native—will hurt his chances at securing the grant he’s applied for. As the train pulls away from the station, he puts his headphones on and selects Radiohead’s song “There There,” the lyrics of which intone “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.” As the train dips underground, Dene spots on the tunnel wall some graffiti he himself tagged years ago.

When Dene was younger and just starting to tag the word “Lens” throughout the Oakland public transit system, his uncle Lucas came to visit him and his mom, Norma, from Los Angeles. Dene hadn’t seen his uncle in years, and was initially impressed by his uncle’s claim that he’d been in Hollywood making movies—however, Dene grew disappointed when he learned that his uncle was only a boom mic operator, and only made his own movies “in his head.” Dene grows even sadder when his uncle Lucas confesses to drinking heavily and nonstop in order to blot out the sense of failure he feels.

Lucas told Dene that he had come to Oakland to work on a new project—a series of on-camera interviews with Indians living in Oakland. Lucas said that a woman named Opal, who “knows a lot of Indians” and may even be a distant “auntie” of Dene’s, had connected him with some Natives who had agreed to share with Lucas the stories of what living in Oakland meant to them. After excitedly describing the project to Dene, Lucas pulled a flash from his hip and drank from it deeply, a strange look in his eyes.

Back in the present, Dene has been stuck underground between stations for ten minutes. He begins to sweat heavily, nervous about missing his interview with the panel, or about having to condense his description of the project he wants to undertake—an extension of his uncle Lucas’s original idea—for the committee.

As a youth, Dene tagged the word “lens” everywhere he could, but writing the graffiti made him feel lonely, as he came to picture the word as “a name written to no one,” a useless cry for attention and connection. One afternoon, Dene returned home to find that Lucas, who had been staying with him and his mother, had been admitted to the hospital. Norma told Dene that Lucas was dying of liver failure due to his heavy drinking, and that there was nothing that could be done. Dene grew angry with his mother for failing to help Lucas, but Norma insisted that she never could have helped her brother for reasons she can’t explain.

In the present, Dene gets off the train in downtown Oakland and navigates his way through the busy streets, but continues thinking of Lucas. He remembers coming home from school and finding Lucas on the couch the day after Norma told Dene that his uncle was dying. When Dene asked Lucas how much time he had left, Lucas replied, “We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us.” Lucas took another drink from his hip flask, apologizing to Dene but assuring him that he would be around a while longer—long enough for them to make a movie together.

Dene enters the building where his interview is to take place. He mops his sweat using his undershirt and then sits in a waiting room next to a white hipster with a bushy beard who introduces himself as Rob. As Rob and Dene talk, Dene feels contempt for the man, who is clearly a white gentrifier with no real concept of what it means to live in Oakland. When Rob quotes a line from one of Gertrude Stein’s writings about returning to her hometown of Oakland after a long time away and seeing the development that had taken place—“There is no there there”—Dene recognizes the quotation and becomes annoyed, feeling that Rob doesn’t truly understand the quote and how it applies to Native experiences of the world.

Dene is called into the interview room, where he sits in front of the panel of judges who are already discussing his work. The panel is made up of an older white woman, two middle-aged black men, two middle-aged white women, a young Latino man, an Indian woman “from India,” and an older Native man wearing turquoise and silver feather earrings. Dene begins explaining his project to the panel, giving them the history of his uncle Lucas’s mission and his desire to collect—and pay—Native storytellers for their stories in order to make what has long “remained invisible” visible. Dene is sick of Native stereotypes on film, and wants to tell “the Urban Indian story.”

As Dene nervously waits for the judges to respond to his pitch and ask questions about his proposal, he takes several deep breaths. After a minute, the only Native man on the panel speaks up to say that though Dene’s idea is “interesting,” it seems to lack “real vision.” Dene, knowing that “it would be the Native guy” to question him if anyone was going to, grows upset. Dene worries that because he is only half-Native, he doesn’t appear Native enough. Another judge, however, speaks up in support of the project, and then one of the women on the panel tells Dene that they’ll all be in touch with him once they’re done meeting with other applicants. On the train home, Dene can’t stop himself from smiling, believing he has won the five-thousand-dollar grant.

In the past, Dene came home from school one afternoon to an empty house. He found his uncle’s camera sitting on the coffee table—Dene picked it up, and found that it has a “pistol grip.” Dene sat alone on the couch with the camera until Norma came home, wearing a look on her face which told Dene that Lucas had died. Dene took the camera out to a local park to escape from home for a while, and on his way back, began filming parts of Oakland, documenting his walk home. Dene came home to find his mother crying in the doorway, and despite feeling a sense of regret for treating his mother cruelly in a difficult time, pointed the camera at her and filmed her weeping.