TALE OF SURVIVAL
Author Tommy Orange addresses the challenges for Native characters, culture
Tommy Orange’s debut novel, “There There,” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, earning acclaim for telling the rarely heard story of Native Americans living in urban America. The book followed residents of Oakland as they struggled with life and their sense of their Native identity.
Since then, Native voices have finally started getting more attention, with television series like “Reservation Dogs,” “Rutherford Falls” and “Dark Winds” and plays like “Between Two Knees” and “Manahatta” changing the playing field for Orange’s follow-up. Martin Scorsese’s film “Killers of the Flower Moon” also focuses on a Native community, though the story is told from a White American perspective.
Orange’s second novel, “Wandering Stars,” manages to be both a sequel and not to “There There,” which ends with a robbery and shooting at a powwow. The last 200 pages of “Wandering Stars” pick up where “There There” left off, but the first third shows the family’s story from the Sand Creek massacre of 1864 through the years when Native Americans were shoved into boarding schools meant to rob them of culture and language.
Orange writes of the children in schools, “If they did not die of what they called consumption even while they regularly were starved; if they were not buried in duty, training for agricultural or industrial labor, or indentured servitude; were they not buried in children’s cemeteries, or in unmarked graves, not lost somewhere between the school and home having run away, unburied, unfound, lost to time, or lost between exile and refuge, between school, tribal homelands, reservation, and city; if they made it through routine beatings and rape, if they survived, made lives and families and homes, it was because of this and only this: Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry.”
Orange, who is Cheyenne and Arapaho, spoke recently by video about the new book and about the intersection of Native and American history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
QWhen did you know you wanted to return to these characters, and how did you decide to go back in their family history?
AWriting about somebody who got shot while dancing wearing regalia and how that would play out in a single family — that had a lot of layers and seemed rich. It felt like a microcosm of the way Native people think about history and the way it affects us, to have the reader wonder about what it would feel like for somebody who’s trying to reconnect with their community to be disrupted by a shooting.
QThere’s so much ground covered in the first third of the book, were you tempted at all to write an epic at twice the length and really fill in those stories?
AI was hesitant to write historical fiction at all; it’s been overdone, and to only think of us in that historical context is damaging. We have only just started getting contemporary depictions of us on TV, so there are still a lot of stories
“I’m trying to bring out the interior lives of a lot of these people to restore humanity that’s been taken away. I want the readers to see the human being in each character.”
— Author Tommy Orange
that haven’t been told. But I wanted to give context in a generational family line sense and give an idea of what these lives could have been like, without fully fleshing out each one.
QDo you think the relative boom of Native stories in the last few years will change how this book is received?
AI do think it’s a completely different context than when “There There” came out, which felt like it took the world by surprise.
For a large number of people, it was like there was some old software running the Native American program about who we are before that; with this book, that update will have already sort of been in place for six years. With all these new stories, the new context lives with people, so I think the understanding deepens by the time they get to “Wandering Stars.”
QBut most TV shows and plays are not about Indians living in urban areas.
AFor more than a decade, 80% of us have been living in cities. There are a lot of stories in that piece of data — years and years of lives and stories that are there to be told. I hope that the success of both books means that people are emboldened to tell those stories and that the industries are open to taking risks on those stories.
QThe character Jude, who lives in the aftermath of the Indian Wars and Sand Creek massacre, says in the book, “We performed being Indian for the white people. Some of us danced and drummed and sang. We performed ourselves, made it look authentic for the sake of performing authenticity. Like being was for sale, and we’d sold ours.” Do you worry about authenticity and the perils of falling into performative aspects when telling your history in an entertaining way?
AI do think about the performative nature of it. In the Native world, authenticity is a charged word — historically, there’s a lot of competition between who’s the more real Native person. We’ve been turned into caricatures and flattened images; we’ve been background characters vaguely wearing some kind of feathers, a stand-in for a human that’s sort of pointing the way of savage.
So, in the writing process, I’m aware of tropes and things that will make it sound like I am trying to write a Native person that’s a caricature, stereotype or just something another author has done. I am thinking, “Does this feel real to the world that I’m making?” I’m trying to bring out the interior lives of a lot of these people to restore humanity that’s been taken away. I want the readers to see the human being in each character.
QThere’s a box containing the family’s history that gets passed down. Is preserving that history even more important because America tried to eradicate the Native cultures, language and history?
AA big part of what I wanted to get across in “Wandering Stars” is that it is truly epic what we have survived — decades and decades of this forced schooling and the erasure of our ways and languages. That we still have thriving communities all over the country who know who they are — that is not nothing.
There are ever-growing ways that we can continue to cultivate Native culture, our tribal histories, and our stories and ways, with music and different forms of art that also express who we are now.
It’s super important to both instill in Native youth and Native people in general whatever stories or traditions we still have that we fought really hard to keep. And our culture is part of American culture.
As a person with a White mother and a Native father, I feel very much a part of American culture — it’s this big tapestry and to understand the context of your country, you need to understand what we did to make it a country.