There There: Prologue Summary & Analysis

The prologue to There There is an extended essay which details the genocidal violence, cultural erasure and appropriation, and dehumanization Native Americans have faced since the arrival of white settlers in North America in the 1400s. An unnamed narrator—possibly the author, Tommy Orange, himself—details the unspeakably cruel ways in which colonists massacred Native Americans, often beheading, quartering, and scalping them after their deaths in order to render their bodies grotesque and less than human. The narrator also invokes the “Indian Head” test pattern, a broadcast which was beamed to every TV in America each night after 1939 and featured a Native American’s head amongst “circles that looked like sights through riflescopes.”

The narrator then transitions into telling an old Cheyenne folktale about a man who found his wife carrying on an affair with a water monster. The man killed and quartered both the monster and his wife, and served their bodies to his children for dinner. During the meal, a head rolled into their home, and no matter where they ran to escape it, it kept following them. The narrator speaks of white people’s manufacture of Native rituals involving rolling heads in movies such as Apocalypto, and the other ways in which Native visages have become “logos and mascots.”

The narrator deconstructs the idea of “massacre as prologue,” examining how the stories of extreme, brutal, unforgivable violence and mutilation Natives suffered for years at the hands of white settlers and colonizers is always in the background of modern-day Native life. White people have long tried to erase Natives from the country—and the “final, necessary step” in doing so was to move them to cities, off reservations, where they’d become assimilated. The narrator writes that Natives, however, made the cities they were moved to theirs, and found community with one another in spite of white American’s desire to terminate Native culture.

Urban Indians, the narrator writes, are the generation of Natives “born in the city.” Though Urban Indians belong to the city, “cities belong to the earth.” The narrator suggests that though the experience of living in a city should be alienating or not “traditional,” many things associated with contemporary Native culture are not in fact traditional—Native people have to make their way in a world which has been arranged for them by white colonizers. “Everything,” the narrator writes, “is new and doomed.”