Orange Pekoe Builds the Future in Old Wounds

A scar is, by its very nature, permanent. There is no hope to return to a land before colonial conquest in Orange Pekoe. There is no attempt to fill the literal hole ripped in the Earth by invaders intent on stripping the land of its resources. It does, however, ask the question of what comes next when the white man has packed up his tools and left the earth stripmined and barren. What does one do with a giant hole in the ground where ancestral land used to be?

In Orange Pekoe, a Maoriland Film Festival official selection, the answer is to build a sprawling metropolis in the pit. The grand city’s floors stretch from deep underground to the height of skyscrapers. The one-point-five-bit graphics paint this place a center of refuge but altogether not an irregular town. The city itself is a neutral entity. It is not some solarpunk dreamscape savior-state for the Anishinaabe people. Windows break. Stray dogs wander the streets. The protagonist still must tip his barista. It is, however, better than the before-times. As the game’s crow says, “Things were different back then.” As the game’s elder says, “They called it a wasteland. Nothing left to take.”

The people of this city have rebuilt it from beneath-the-ground up, its foundation the same jagged gash that once claimed this land from them. This process was not a short one. An older city park is seen to be established in 2135, almost a hundred years after the closure of the mine. The reclamation is shown to be a slow and careful retaking. Neo-Rome was truly not built in a day, and one gets the sense that this metropolis has been a community-wide undertaking spanning across decades and generations.

There exists in the world of Orange Pekoe a small thread of conflict between the people who live below ground and those that live beneath the light of the sky. You as a protagonist enjoy the sights of the overworld but your ultimate goal is to deliver tea and head home, to the underground. Sam, a friend, remarks that those that have chosen to return to earth have forgotten the sight of the sky, and those that live above have forgotten the sound of the earth.

It is no mistake that the world we are shown is that which is above ground. Here, we are barred access to a greenhouse and forced to scavenge for spare change. This world of the above is the world most similar to our own. The characters here depend on each other to happily exist amidst capitalism and physical remnants of a colonial past, but the essential fact that they require that community paints the above-ground in an ill light. We see less of the below-ground, other than the anecdote that there are some who refuse to leave it. Here, one envisions a world closer to an imprisoning paradise. Those who live here have quite literally returned to the heart of the earth, at the cost of ever getting to see the colonial-tainted sky again.

In a humble maneuver, Orange Pekoe strives for a perceived sense of achievable, somewhat tragic normalcy where so many might be caught up in utopian futurisms. Here, it says, is a world defined by its culture—but not insomuch that it is not confined by the stripes of capitalism, nor so closed off that a city elder cannot enjoy the game’s namesake Chinese tea. It echoes the gait of any cosmopolitan city. It places the Anishinaabe not as tree-hugging, return-to-salt indigenous stereotypes but established city-dwellers forging a future all their own.

My grandfather carried the attitude all his life that the future of the Mixtecs was America. To him, Mexico was a place soiled by the deep-seeded tendrils of colonialism. He rebuked Mexican Catholicism at every turn and swore off the Spanish language entirely upon immigration to the United States. And yet, I know he carried a fondness for his home city of Oaxaca de Juárez. Scarred as it may be by Spanish conquest, he was happier there than I ever saw him in America. Surrounded by the arts, family, and culture, he thrived on familiar stone streets and late night patio bars. He deserved to have Oaxaca as his home. Oaxaca was his home, vivid and beautiful and still standing. He had friends there. He was loved, there. He has a mural, there, in a little restaurant dedicated to the great artists and musicians hailing from the state. He visited the city frequently in his old age. He threatened to retire there, if he ever stopped working. We cannot take back hundreds of years of violent conquest but we can continue to exist within the ashes. We can reclaim the places taken from us. We can have the courage to return, to rebuild, and to call them home.

In the spirit of indigenous community-building, a co-worker of mine has developed a semi-cooperative board game based in Cherokee folk stories. I highly recommend you be notified of its launch on Kickstarter, here. ✧