Ashley McMullen

“Dene wants to tell him he'd looked up the [Gertrude Stein] quote in its original context, in her Everybody's Autobiography, and found that she was talking about the place where she'd grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore. Dene wants to tell him it's what happened to Native people, he wants to explain that they're not the same, that Dene is Native, born and raised in Oakland, from Oakland. ... The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn't read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it's been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.”
― Tommy Orange, There There