I. Meeting Tony

Tony Loneman, of Tommy Orange's novel There There (2018), discovers his abnormal bodymind at age six. 1 Peering into the warped mirror of a television screen, the Cheyenne boy sees a "dark reflection," the answer to the question of a playground taunt: "Why's your face look like that?" (15). 2 "It was the first time I saw it. My own face, the way everyone else saw it," he tells us, in response to a visage that bears the marks of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), or the "Drome" (15). 3 The phantasmic appearance of "it" soon overwhelms him, transforming his specially-contoured countenance into something strange—a haunting apparition of the past—through the violent, clinical processes of staring, interrogation, and diagnosis. 4 As the "Drome" "stretche[s] across the screen," Tony cannot "make the face …. [his] own again" (15-16). In this growing chasm between subjectivity and materiality, the original, incendiary question finds a reprise. The boy's bodymind becomes dispossessed of its owner—his corporeality (re-)colonized. In Tony's words, "Most people don't have to think about what their faces mean the way I do" (15).

It is this voice that invites us into the fictional world of There There, which wends its way to the big Oakland powwow via twelve characters of mixed-Indigenous backgrounds. It is this illimitable presence through which Orange frustrates settler-colonial attempts at pathologizing native bodyminds; 5 nuances hypermedicalized discourses about the horrors of FAS/D specifically; and revises the typical ends to which literary (especially intellectual) disability is deployed. 6 In short, the character Tony Loneman disrupts several vectors of normativity over the course of There There, both reflecting and driving the serpentine, nearly concentric, structural and temporal movement of this generically complicated novel which is structured by his experiences. 7

To show how Orange accomplishes these interdependent feats, the present article closely reads three narratively and thematically significant moments in which Tony—the first entry in a "Cast of Characters" that prefaces There There (xi-ii)—stars: first, his realization of the "Drome"; second, a confrontation with a white woman who interrogates his cultural and corporeal alterity in a scene that rescripts the original colonial encounter; and finally, in the novel's last section, a remembered conversation with his grandmother that sparks an interrogation about identity: "What are we? Grandma, what are we?" Tony wonders, a companion to the earlier question which his reflection answered (288). With these pillared concerns—the "why" of nonnormative embodiment and the "what" of cultural identity—Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, invites us to consider how disability and Indigeneity are, at once, in tension with while also mutually constitutive of one another through three ongoing operations of the colonial project: the branding, transformation, and invasive reading of the bodymind. 8

In the process, we follow Indigenous Studies scholar Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux tribe) to consider how the signature tactics of settler colonialism that deal with individual bodyminds—tactics which can involve uncomfortable, and often hidden or invisible, intersubjective meetings—function in time. Estes describes settler colonialism as uniquely insidious because "unlike other forms of colonialism in which the colonizers rule from afar and sometimes leave, settler colonialism attempts to permanently and completely replace Natives with a settler population. The process is never complete, and the colonial state's methods for gaining access to new territories change over time." 9 In other words, settler colonialism in the United States of America permeates the contemporary moment, while at the same time perpetuating a past history of forced removal and oppression, as the occupying state imagines and enforces new methods of disempowering Indigenous peoples. Many of its mechanisms of power find their "specific, irreducible element" of territoriality not only on geographical but also on somatic and mental space such that Indigenous peoples are dispossessed of sovereignty over their bodyminds as well as over their land. 10 A secure sense of physiological and psychic self—the right to self-actualize and cognize one's identity—is therefore made elusive for Native individuals in America today. But we aim to shed further light on such enforced evasion—and on the overlapping micro-methods of settler and ableist oppression that effect it—by attending to Tony's interpersonal encounters and the layered, even dueling, temporalities of the intergenerational trauma that rises to the fore in these moments. This trauma was born from settler-colonialism's early overt tactics but is protracted by the project's furtive ongoing programs. Bodymind and land, history and the contemporary, become metonymically connected in There There as Orange crafts a past that is continuously unfolding in the present and beyond. The journey to the novel's twenty-first century powwow progresses to the beats of a multigenerational thrum.

While showing the toll settler colonialism exacts upon Indigenous bodyminds, however, Orange also dramatizes conflicts between Native American and western European conceptions of nonnormative embodiment. The latter come into focus under the auspices of early modernity's "protomedical model of disability," increasingly as nature's stigmatizing errors that must be studied and then rectified or eliminated. 11 This mandate is typically translated into literary terms via the common cure-or-kill disability plot, wherein the narrative emerges to prostheticize, and ultimately resolve, ostensibly deficient bodyminds. 12 Orange can at times flirt with, and even gesture towards, these conventions, but he subverts them too. Beneath the palimpsest of Tony's presence are occluded layers of literary precursors, such as Joseph Conrad's Stevie (The Secret Agent, 1907)—who "enable[s] the reader to evaluate" this tonally intricate novel's "moral anarchy" but whose predictable death merely precipitates, rather than participates in, its true climax—and William Faulkner's Benjy (The Sound and the Fury, 1929), whose experimentally associative narration introduces us to the failing Compson family. 13 But, in ways that we explore throughout this article, Orange also returns Tony to the center of narrative activity (unlike Stevie); insists that he be depicted as a fully realized character with knowledge (indebted to the lived experiences of his "abnormal" bodymind) to be appreciated and even conserved (unlike Benjy); and to reinstate his presence at the end of the novel in an iconoclastic writing of the typically prosthetic plot.

Orange's commitment to reevaluating Tony's nonnormative bodymind through the prism of traditionally Native approaches to health drives these formal and thematic innovations. In contrast to the western European aesthetic and material fidelity to the medical model, "most Indigenous communities had no word or concept for what in American English we today call 'disability.'" 14 The nearest analogue for many tribes, "unwellness," was a state often "characterized by disharmony in the body, mind, or spirit" which depended upon one's kinship relations rather than a failure of the bodymind. 15 The construct of disability as deviation from a contrived norm therefore enters only after colonial contact and the establishment of those pernicious structures that entail constant redefinition of Indigenous bodyminds by settlers. 16

In magnifying for closer attention both the friction and dovetail of these two subject positions—i.e., of disability and Indigeneity—we follow the lead of scholars who problematize disability studies' longtime prioritization of whiteness by amplifying Indigenous voices that manage to find value in the particulars and lived experiences of putatively "abnormal" bodyminds while still railing against the structures of power that often gave rise to these same bodyminds' impairment, and then disability, in the first place. 17 Which is to say: although the cognitive and physical differences of Orange's characters are forged in the crucible of systematic oppression, they are not pressed into service as static images of settler colonialism's cruelty. On the contrary, these bodyminds generate forms of knowledge central to acts of resistance at the heart of this article. 18

II. The Drome

Tony understands "the Drome" as "[his] mom and why she drank," "the way history lands on a face" (16). As such, the easiest gloss of his visage is that it betrays nothing more (nor less) than settler colonialism's stain, the "cumulative emotional and psychological wounding, over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma experiences." 19 Left in their wake is a legacy of "historical unresolved grief that accompanies the trauma," first in the substance abuse of Tony's mother and then in the proportions of his own uniquely-shaped head (7). Before the television screen, he thus becomes initiated into the rites of remembering as "a process of being fed by the past, not just [his] past but [his] ancestral past, the earth's past, and the past of other human beings." 20 In an earlier (and controversial) work, author Michael Dorris travels into similar space when he describes his adopted son Adam—who was diagnosed with FAS later in life—as "not born whole" because of "someone else's Original Sin, or a crime committed in ignorance or wanton carelessness before he was born." 21 The fateful transgression here is twofold, and interconnected almost to the point of conflation: the introduction of alcohol into Indigenous communities by settler colonists and Adam's birth mother's decision to drink while pregnant. 22 In There There, Tony himself voices a similar resentment in conversations with his incarcerated mother, who explains that telling his father he exists is no simple feat: "Don't call me simple," he insists, "Don't fucking call me simple. You fucking did this to me" (19). 23

But the nuances of Orange's text ultimately belie any kind of straightforward, unitary explication of FAS/D as all-defining and invariably tragic. Admittedly, historical trauma manifests clinically in the name of Tony's official diagnosis, "fetal alcohol syn-drome" (15), but at the moment that his grandmother reveals this label, the words slip away, unable to settle on the boy's tongue or ear. He does not hear them, in a sensory complement to readily visible differences. 24 "All I heard her say was Drome, and then I was back in front of the turned-off TV, staring at it," Tony confesses (15-16). The clinical verbiage is unutterable and incomputable, an uncomfortable third party both integral to Tony's impaired body and alien to it. For the "Drome"'s creation depends upon a question conditioned by settler-colonial logic. Embedded in that playground taunt is the force of a western, binary relationship between normal and abnormal, the "that" of "Why's your face look like that?" and the implicit standard against which this is defined. The query is unconcerned with whether the various facets of Tony's body, mind, and spirit are in harmony with one another, in the diction of Indigenous conceptions of (un)wellness. Its only obsession is with the specifics of his supposed lack or deficit. Things are not so simple for Tony himself, however: always the "Drome" remains conceptually ambivalent, both a "power and curse" (16), or as he puts it, "what gives me my soul" and "a face worn through," like the character-laden sock in desperate need of a good darning (18). He might "know what [his] face looks like" and "what it means" (16), but what it means far exceeds the trauma—of droopy eyes and a gaping mouth "like [he's] all fucked up" and high (16)—that initially meets the eye.

It is true, then, that the landscape of Tony's face has been reordered as something abnormal by the playground jeer and the ideologies it encapsulates into; his "eyes, nose, mouth, spread out like a drunk slapped it on reaching for another drink" (16). And it is this facial mapping, scripted by the reverberating violences of coloniality, that pressures the stakes of anthropologist Patrick Wolfe's famous observation: "settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event." 25 The era of colonial contact—that time of infiltration and trespassing of foreign bodies and unfamiliar substances on Indigenous land—enacted a pollution on both land and body. Coloniality's insatiability for possession and decimation extends from the geographical to the human corporeal, from the time of contact to the contemporary; bodyminds are sculpted, structured, stretched, and territorialized alongside land itself, like land itself. Geography is insufficient for that rapaciousness found within the "insatiable dynamic whereby settler colonialism always needs more land"; this rapaciousness haunts in the legacy of historical trauma that continues to structure the Indigenous mind and body. 26

However, Tony maintains some sense of sovereignty over his body—this second site of occupation—by relocating the "Drome" from its longer, biomedical label towards a novel epistemology. 27 "They told me I'm stupid," the now-twenty-one-year-old unsentimentally announces, but his counselor at the Indian Center rejects such a devaluation and simplification by describing that "people with FAS are on a spectrum, have a wide range of intelligences, that the intelligence test is biased, and that I got strong intuition and street smarts, that I'm smart where it counts, which I already knew, but when she told me it felt good" (17). From the jaws of standardized tests, Tony is saved by the affirmation of a fellow Indigenous person, who reverses another settler-colonial construction of aberrance. Rather than assess the body and mind via different metrics, she affirms Tony's competency by construing them together, insisting that his true intelligence is inextricable from his embodiment, especially his embodied knowledge of the hometown he navigates seamlessly, Oakland. Tony also "know[s] what people have in mind" (17). All his life he has lived below layers of meaning, behind the wall of the "Drome" that settler-colonialism interpolates between his body and the outside world, so the need "to look past the first look people give you," to "find that other one, right behind it," turns out to be nothing new (17)."All you gotta do," he tells us while putting a new spin on accusations of slowness, "is wait a second longer than you normally do and you can catch it, you can see what they got in mind back there" (17). This awareness—Tony's realization that "[p]eople look at me then look away when they see I see them see me"—marks Orange's most significant departure from the uses to which cognitive disability is typically put in literature. 28 It elevates Tony from mediator of virtuosic formal innovation (like Benjy) or catalyst of ironic climax (like Stevie) into the realm of something else entirely. He becomes a compelling presence who imparts his knowledge even as he shares, and recognizes, his flaws. He becomes a compelling figure both for his importance to the novel's exploration of its central themes and for his sharply-realized experiences of FAS/D, narrated to us in a voice that is playful and completely earnest by turns.

III. Reinscription

The day of the powwow, Tony dons his regalia, boards a train to the Coliseum in Oakland, and enters a public sphere flush with eyes that gaze and surveil. "[A]n older white woman" is "sitting across from him," but the passivity of sitting quickly transforms into the aggression of an interrogation (234). She asks two questions: one to disarm, a simple request for directions to the airport, and one to estrange: "so you're…a Native American?" (235). She utters this last one only after Tony has discerned that her first query for directions is a ruse: "She would have already looked it up on her phone numerous times to be sure" (235). What she really wants, Tony infers, is "to see if the Indian speaks"—both because of Tony's perceived physical deformities and because of a genocidal commitment to the impossibility of his presence as a Native American in the contemporary moment, in a city like Oakland. Still, "it's the second question she means to get to. The face behind the face she makes says it all" (235). The woman does not ask Tony if he is Native American, but if he is a Native American. Her indefinite article suggests exoticism, objectification, and the erasure of individual difference, all of which questions Tony's ability to exist in the space of the train, or the temporality of the contemporary. She renders his subject position exactly that—a question. But refusing to indulge the woman's desire for fraught labels of atavism, Tony instead describes his vibrant participation in the contemporary moment by explaining that "there's a powwow"—and inviting her to the event (235). He can "hear that she's responding, but he doesn't listen" (235, our emphasis). Tony's characteristic failure of audition is once again an advantage, a resistance to subjugation under his interlocutor's eye and tongue, a radical upsetting of a power imbalance as he avers that "it can't matter what" she is saying (235). 29

Tony has long grown accustomed to "being stared at," "[n]ever for any other reason than the Drome," "a car wreck you should but can't look away from" (234). But now, his seemingly aberrant face and his "blue, red, orange, yellow, and black" regalia—which announces his Native American culture—work in tandem, speaking to each other, complicating and amplifying how his body is read by contemporary settler-trespasser figures. In this scene, Orange forces his readers to adopt that gaze: the uncomfortable position of the observer who gawks at, in order to gloss, the young man's atypical bodymind rather than engage with him as intimate confidant. For in the gap between our initial encounter with Tony and our second, Orange reverts from the first-person to the third in the sections that bear the young man's name. Momentarily, we're confronted with the possibility that this distancing strategy is one aimed at slowly eliminating the abnormal bodymind from its central position in the narrative, potentially allowing Tony to become a one-dimensional signifier of the tragedy that ensues. Indeed, he travels to the Powwow in part to rob its coffers, a key participant in a plot that sweeps up several of There There's other characters. 30 Yet knotted into the representation of Tony are subtler complexities. By shutting off our access to the young man's inner life, Orange divulges how the colonial eye interprets Tony's body with the same occupational force that abstracts and fetishizes a fantasy of what the powwow is, while simultaneously appropriating the accoutrements of regalia. 31 Manipulating people and culture into objects for commodification, the white American imaginary disavows the modernity of Native Americans and perpetuates false ideologies of extinction and foreignness through stereotypical imagery. Regalia is therefore an example of the larger quandary that plagues modern Native Americans who must live within the disorienting state of the "real and unreal"—in Indigenous historian and activist Vine Deloria, Jr.'s (Standing Rock Sioux) formulation—a contemporary subjectivity shaped by and through continued colonial violences. 32

One form of this truculence manifests in the creation of the fetishized "pretty history" that begins and ends with the body—or that depends upon "reading the signs on [the] body," and even reading the "body as a sign" itself. 33 Feminist writer Sara Ahmed argues that these acts of reading constitute 'the subject' in relation to 'the stranger' who is recognized as 'out of place' in a given place." 34 Tony's regalia is one such sign, a mark of strangeness, which arouses certain cultural expectations and racial assumptions. But he finds a grim humor in the stares of other passengers as his disability becomes only one component of a larger spectacle: "an Indian dressed like an Indian on the train" (234). Just as the "Drome" once transformed into a third party between Tony and his interlocutors, the young man's body in regalia becomes, too, something outside of him: it is a body scripted as a cultural remnant, a historical relic, a perverse sign made possible by the modern, hegemonic, American consciousness.

Native American historian Philip Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux) describes just such a process in his articulation of the fantasy Americans dreamed up at the turn of the twentieth century, that genocidal notion of the Indigenous as "people, corralled on isolated and impoverished reservations" who "missed out on modernity—indeed almost dropped out of history itself." 35 Disenfranchised from his tokenized and paradoxical body, Tony similarly becomes an unmoored stranger, reflecting upon that phantasmic image of "an Indian dressed like an Indian," which the woman's gaze violently births (234). He even goes so far as to catalogue the proliferation of unreal signs that give rise to the ultimate phantasmic other: the animate stereotype, which Philip Deloria defines as "a simplified and generalized expectation … that comes to rest in an image," "a crudely descriptive connection between power, expectation, and representation." 36 The orange of Tony's regalia, for instance, evokes the "fire at night," an "image people love to think about" and one at the heart of the settler American imagination, "Indians around a fire" (234). This facile association indeed remands Native Americans to a bygone era, reinscribing primitivism upon them and laying the groundwork for microagressions when the stereotype finds purchase in the interpersonal encounter between an Indigenous and non-Indigenous interlocuter. But Tony short-circuits such an aggressive act of interpretation. He imagines himself not as the Indian by the fire but as "the fire and the dance and the night" (234). 37 The equation of disability + Indigeneity encompasses no less than the entirety of the powwow at this crucial junction of intersectionality: a celebration of culture; the deft, delicate dance of identity; and the flickering, flaming rage and beauty that resists easy definition, signification, containment. He then frustrates the woman's interrogation by ignoring her voice and removing himself from the train altogether. Tony "steps off" and "takes off, skipping two steps the whole way down" (235). For the moment at least, he has brought the appropriation of his bodymind to an end.

IV. Intergenerational Reparation

There There reaches its devastating apex amid a horrific mass shooting in the novel's final section, when historical trauma reaches a crescendo in the form of inter-tribal violence at the same powwow to where Tony was traveling. Here, the aftershocks of settler colonialism reverberate, and these temporal echoes also excavate personal memories. For Tony, they are of childhood, evoked by the violence of being felled in the fusillade of bullets: "He watches himself go up, out of himself, then watches himself from above, looks at his body, and remembers that it was never actually him. He was never Tony just like he was never the Drome. Both were masks" (288). Apparently divorced from the colonial eye's constructions, Tony once more perceives his bodymind without the accretions of disability, returning to an earlier time with his grandmother in the kitchen, a moment before encountering the intrusive "Drome" but, importantly, not before his impairments were effected.

No longer is he "twenty-one-year-old Tony thinking about his four-year-old self—remembering. He's just there again, all the way back to being four-year-old Tony" (288). The strength of memory is in viscerally merging past and present, in creating a lived experience that is outside of limiting western notions of temporality and being in the world. As Estes describes them, "settler narratives use a linear conception of time to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against Indigenous peoples and the land … but Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be entirely structured by our past and by our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is our future." 38 Just such a conflation of temporalities allows Tony to disrupt the colonial discrimination between normal and abnormal bodyminds—itself underpinned by a linear timeline of observation, diagnosis, and then cure (or kill)—at the novel's close. 39 The western time of teleology is abandoned to the wayside, and a circular remembrance that deals not only in times past but also in the possible futures memories may imagine firmly takes center stage at last. A remembrance of specifically Indigenous relationality. Tony recalls a time and place where the surveilling eyes of colonial bodies are nowhere to be found; the scene includes only his grandmother, Maxine, and him, cleaning up after supper. Washing dishes is an act of play for the four-year-old Tony, who "dip[s] his hand into the sink and blow[s] bubbles at her out of the palm of his hand. She doesn't think it's funny, but she doesn't stop him. She keeps wiping the bubbles on the top of his head. He keeps asking her: What are we? Grandma, what are we? She doesn't answer" (288). It is her turn to use selective hearing. Maxine refuses to dignify the question with a response, eschewing the sociocultural labels and ontological definitions any kind of answer would require. Tony's existential inquiry thus capitulates to interpersonal communion, which is answer enough.

In this remembrance, relationality possesses futurative potential—in fact, the radical possibility to live within connections that are outside of and otherwise to the colonial structures and forces that plague the Indigenous bodymind. We are reminded here of Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle's understanding of memory as a phenomenon that serves—not as "a simple act of recall" but as "a process of being fed by the past, not just my past but my ancestral past, the earth's past, and the past of other human beings. We are responsible for pulling the best threads from our past forward to re-weave our lives." 40 Earlier, we discussed a process of futures curated by past memories through historical trauma, but Maracle suggests an Indigenous methodology that rings more cosmological than sociological, that transcends the linearity and temporality of settler colonialism to dive, radically, into a future resplendent with possibility for transformative resistance. The thread of memory that Orange pulls for Tony recalls the pre-colonial, Indigenous conception of wellness as harmonious, good relations. The joy experienced between grandmother and grandson, within a kinship relation unpolluted by colonial figures, harkens back to this past, while remembrance also projects it into the future, into a time and space that holds rich possibilities for "re-weaving." Communion at the most basic levels, between bodyminds, during this felt experience makes possible Tony's recuperation of sovereignty over his physiological and mental territories. Recollection realizes this almost utopic experience wherein Indigenous bodyminds encounter one another through touch, elation, and delight—affects that become potentialities only after prescribed western identities of pathologized physical and cognitive difference are expelled.

Orange more explicitly gestures to the potential for transformation as Tony's state of remembering-being continues. The four-year-old plays with Transformer toys, staging a fantastic scene, a dramatic arc of battle, betrayal, and sacrifice. He ventriloquizes one of the action-figures, "made of metal, made hard, able to take it," with the idea that "we were made to transform. So if you get a chance to die, to save someone else, you take it. Every time. That's what autobots were put here for" (289-290). Sacrifice begets metamorphosis, and for Tony, that sacrifice is a shedding. His intertwined and indivisible sense of past/present/future persists, even when he awakes from this dreamlike reverie to the feeling of his body on the powwow field, to the feeling of "an anchor, something he's been rooted to all this time, as if in each hole there is a hook attached to a line pulling him down" (290). Gunshot wounds meld him to the earth, from whence birds sing, "keeping him up. Keeping him going" (290). Their melodies presage a harmony that can be realized only after the body is no longer inscribed as different.

In fact, hierarchies between bodies dissolve altogether as the birds sustain Tony, and as he feels them inside of his body, in an ostensibly near-death moment. This marks another nearly utopic enclave of relationality, broadened further by the addition of non-human animals in a powerful reminder of the "fundamental Indigenous idea that all species and all beings [are] organically and morally related to one another." 41 Meanwhile, Tony's earlier coping mechanism of selective hearing dramatically reverses: listening to the music that hums about him, he again remembers his grandmother. He recalls that she once told him, "You have to dance like birds sing in the morning," while "show[ing] him how light she could be on her feet … Tony needs to be light now. Let the wind sing through the holes in him," the speaker's voice intones, "listen to the birds singing. Tony isn't going anywhere. And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he'll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing" (290). The young man will "always be" in this moment that combines memory with the present, that merges the metaphorical and literal, and that opens up relationality across bodies, time, and even species in a radical opposition to colonial logics. This state of being, Orange suggests, has a truly durative potential.

Conclusion

"To re-member is, first, directional," Lee Maracle writes. 42 "Indigenous people commit to memory those events and the aspects of those events that suit the direction we are moving in or the direction we want to move in if a shift is occurring." 43 The direction There There moves in, the trace of its forward-glancing trajectory, the shift it demands, occurs through memory itself—that phenomenon which disentangles Tony from normative logics of embodiment. Orange's recourse to remembrances of childhood pressures the novel's ultimate ambiguity, a liberative register that serves to extricate the text itself from the conventional "kill or cure" disability plot. For this story ends in medias res, with Tony's ultimate fate—as well as the fates of many others who are wounded at the powwow—left unclear. 44 Turning to a childhood untainted by unwanted gazes—those violent eyes that labor to defamiliarize Indigenous people from their own bodies and subjectivities—invites the possibility of valuing bodymind variation. 45 In this invitation is a radical protest of the western construct of disability, as we are left in a kitchen where grandmother and grandson play in a moment of harmonious relation. In fact, Orange's text demands we consider harmony as a powerful and necessary remedy to those colonial logics that hound and haunt the Indigenous bodymind. A shift is indeed occurring in this text as Tony travels to the past, to this event of relationality and wellness that Orange extols as a script—perhaps even a map—for inhabiting the future.

We have dwelt within the conceptual ambivalence of disability in There There, its intricate relationship to Indigeneity, and Orange's important emphasis on the lived realities of nonnormative embodiment to consider the avenues for social, corporeal, and psychic liberation that Indigenous epistemologies make available. Never does Orange force fetal alcohol spectrum disorder into being an easy vehicle for the metaphorical tenors of colonialism's widespread evils. 46 Human variability is not something to be cured, eliminated, or decried, despite the obvious intergenerational trauma that has effected it. Even in moments when Tony worries over what he has become (e.g., 19, 68), the monstrosity in question seems to be a fantasy of colonialism's making rather than inherent to the character's personhood. Always the line between natural and unnatural remains blurred until the gaze of the settler draws it in the sand.