Every few years or so there'll be a big movie about slavery and what a terrible thing it was. I never watch them. Why not? Because I already know that. It's a message that was, rightly, pounded into my head since I was in elementary school. I'm sixty now, which means I came of age during the Civil Rights era. Believe me, I know all about what a bad thing slavery was.
 The same is true when it comes to movies about mistreatment of American Indians, so the prologue of Tommy Orange's There There had me saying uh-oh to myself. It's a clips file of mistreatment and disrespectful treatment of American Indians, albeit a well-written one. Many of the examples are ones I knew already.
 The book doesn't stick to that, though. It's about American Indians today, ones living in Oakland, California.
 Two things you should know before reading it:
 At first it looks like a collection of profiles of individual American Indians. There's more to it than that. Their stories coalesce and they all have something to do with one another. Keep that in mind when reading There There.
 Plastic guns made on 3-D printers are unreliable and unsafe and not are usually single-shot guns. There are revolver models of them, but the cylinders are the size of coffee cans.
 An excerpt I liked is one when one Native American is coaching others on how to perform a dance at a large gathering at a city football stadium:

"Now you young men in here, listen up. Don't get too excited out there. That dance is your prayer. So don't rush it, and don't dance how you practice. There's only one way for an Indian man to express himself. It's that dance that comes all the way back there. All the way over there. You learn that dance to keep it, to use it. Whatever you got going on in your life, you don't leave it all in here, like them players do when they go out on that field, you bring it with you, you dance it. Any other way you try to say what you really mean, it's just gonna make you cry. Don't act like you don't cry. That's what we do. Indian men. We're crybabies. You know it. But not out there," he says, and points to the door of the locker room.