Tommy Orange is the author of the novel There There.
With a last name like Orange you can imagine I’ve given some thought to names and what they mean. Kids weren’t mean about my name growing up because they just said it and it was funny. Plus they couldn’t rhyme anything with it.
Orange is where my dad’s name came from. We’re Southern Cheyenne, and it’s a Southern Cheyenne name. I didn’t know what it meant – we just knew it had to do with road trips back to Oklahoma in the summer and winter weeks we had off. We’re still finding out how much we do and don’t understand about where that name comes from.
My dad has given us different answers. He’s thought a lot about being an Orange. He thinks the origin was likely arbitrary. When they ran out of officer names and troop names they maybe, sometimes, just picked a name out of the air – out of a colour in the sky at the time.
When I was too young to care – and my older sisters were just old enough to care a great deal about what other kids thought about us – our mom had orange hair and drove an orange van. My sisters made our mom drop us off two blocks from school. It was too much. Around that time my dad came into my classroom to give a presentation about being native American. This had to have been in November. He brought hides and knives and arrowheads. Stuff I’d never seen at home. Home was a meal together, was watching TV afterward, doing homework. Home was a long prayer before dinner and the smell of cigarettes when my dad came back into the house.
I always knew we were Cheyenne. Native Americans were something that happened. This country: It was the end of what we once were. But we didn’t end there. My dad is fluent in Cheyenne. It’s his first language. He was raised by his grandparents. All my dad ever called our people was “Indian.” Whenever I heard my dad say “American Indian” or “native American,” it sounded wrong. Like words he was using for other people’s sake. The way my dad said Indian, how we were Indian, how we are Indians, that always felt the most right, the most like we belonged, right there in that word – the way he said it.
Most native people I’ve known in the United States call themselves native. When I’ve heard someone call themselves “native American” it sounds to me like they’re not intimate or familiar with their background, their blood, their tribe, their culture, what have you. And when I hear someone say they’re “American Indian,” it’s likely they’re an older person – they maybe lived through the sixties or seventies, through the native civil-rights era. Plenty of Indians still call themselves, and other Indians, “Indians.” That naming itself and what to call a people from the outside is problematic or uncomfortable or even unknown; who’s the authority on it? This is actually a good thing, I think. It indicates the way we feel about native people and what happened. Like when you hear a white person lower their voice as they say “black” when describing a black person. Then they’ll look around to see if anyone noticed they said black. You don’t hear anyone lowering their voice when they say Indian.
I know people in Canada say First Nations almost exclusively when referring to themselves, who they are and who they come from. I don’t know. And regarding people around the world from cultures with respectful relationships to the Earth, you hear Indigenous. We probably have more in common than we do difference. Indigenous people. But there is a risk to generalize, to PanIndianize. We don’t want to lose our particulars.
My Indian name means Birds Singing in the Morning. Did I deserve this name? My dad thought of it early one morning just after I was born. Has it meant something more, considering who I’ve become? I don’t know. Probably. Names are stories. But sometimes names don’t mean anything. Sometimes names are just passed down to keep the power with the dads. Other times, words and names are just our way at pointing toward the thing we really mean. Like the finger at the moon. That moonness. That quality. Words and names don’t get all the way there. The sight of the moon does. Maybe even the sound of word “moon” spoken. Or the concept of an orb orbiting an orb which orbits an orb. Maybe we can only ever orbit true meaning?
People still don’t know what to call us. Native American. American Indian. First Nations. Indigenous. There are plenty of native people who just want to be called by the name of their tribe, their nation. There are natives who don’t want to be called anything. Who want to be left alone. I’ve chosen to write a book and now I could be asked to answer for any number of looming questions for our community. I know enough to know I can’t and am not willing to be the voice to answer the unasked and too-many-times-asked questions. You can celebrate us without calling us anything necessarily regarding our background. White writers have enjoyed decades of praise this way. We are a quality, not a quantity. We are humans, we are flawed, we write, and we sing, and we bleed, and we want to be acknowledged in the way other humans are, as present day people, living now, and not as historical objects in museums and history books.