In this way, the quote touches on the themes of authenticity and home, pointing out what has been lost at the hands of development and white colonization. Stein identifies a "there," or a comfort and sense of home, that is no longer there. The quote itself describes how Gertrude Stein's assessment of Oakland, her former home, matches the pattern of loss that Native people experience all over the continent. This small moment is a microcosm of the larger historical conquest and theft by white people of Native heritage and identity. There is an ironic element to this moment, when this significant quote, central to the Dene's identity, is pointed out to him by a white stranger competing for resources with him. This quote explains the title of the novel, There There. 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. Toklas, and found that she was talking about how 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 he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Autobiography of Alice B.
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