This project examines the relationship between transnational Indigeneity and effectuate trauma in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008). The novel’s protagonist, Thomas Just, endures trauma that emerges from a transnational adoption narrative, which complicates notions of race- and place-based conceptions of selfhood. To analyze Thomas’s production of identity, I look to Kevin Bruyneel’s The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations (2007) and Mark Jerng’s Claiming Others: Transracial Adoption and National Belonging (2010). Through these lenses, I interrogate the onto-epistemological boundaries that complicate Thomas’s ability to exist in more than one culture and topological community at once. Thomas’s identity exists in and of a metaphysical and sociopolitical “elsewhere” that, although is of two places, is not confined in these physical places and further prevents him from wholly re-integrating into the two communities in which he was once a part.