‘Wandering Star’ a piercing portrait of Native American experiences
In 2018, Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There,” offered a stunning portrait of what he called “urban Indians,” a contemporary Cheyenne family living in Oakland, California. Emotionally powerful and lyrically written, it focused on the story of a teenager named Orvil Red Feather.
Orange, whose heritage is Cheyenne, Arapaho and white, draws deeply on his own experience for his fiction. His new novel, “Wandering Stars,” is both a prequel and a sequel to the events of “There There,” stretching back to the life of Orvil’s ancestor Jude Star, a survivor of the terrible Sand Creek massacre in 1864, and forward to the aftermath of the shooting that injures Orvil at the climax of the first book.
At the core of both books is America’s devastatingly contradictory treatment of its Indigenous people. The early attempts of European settlers to wipe them out were followed by centuries of the opposing forces of assimilation and racism, stripping them of their Native identities yet making it impossible for them to be considered part of white culture.
The impact of those forces on individuals and families is at the heart of “Wandering Stars.” When Jude Star, as a young man, escapes the slaughter at Sand Creek, he leaves almost everything behind. Eventually, on the verge of starvation, Jude turns himself in to the U.S. Army and becomes one of the many Indigenous men imprisoned at Castillo de
San Marcos in St. Augustine.
The prison is overseen by Richard Henry Pratt, a real historical person who would later help found the notorious system of Indian boarding schools. Pratt’s motto was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” assimilation reduced to its most brutal essence.
Yet, Jude tells us, at the same time they are being taught to read and write, cut their hair and wear uniforms, be as white as possible, they’re never allowed to forget they aren’t white. “We performed being Indian for the white people. Some of us danced and drummed and sang,” he says. “We performed ourselves, made it look authentic for the sake of performing authenticity.
Like being was for sale, and we’d sold ours.”
Released from prison, Jude marries, develops a drinking problem but overcomes it, and has a son, Charles, who ends up in Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Charles’ experiences there are so horrific (although Orange describes them only obliquely) that he ends up in San Francisco, addicted to laudanum.
Those cycles of addiction and family disintegration repeat through the generations until we catch up to Orvil’s family in the present day. He and his brothers, Loother and Loney, live with their great-aunt, Opal, a strong and loving mother figure. The boys’ grandmother, Jacquie, a recovering addict, is back in the family circle as well.
Orange’s writing shines when he focuses on their family dynamic, full of hardship but leavened with their shared sense of mordant humor and an almost unspoken belief in the importance of their heritage. At one point Opal and Jacquie, who in “There There” spent part of their childhood at the occupation of the prison at Alcatraz by Native American activists, take the boys there for a reunion, a complex and somewhat surreal event.
Orvil is trying to heal after the incident that came at the end of “There There”: His attempt to connect with his Cheyenne identity by participating in a dance at a powwow at the Oakland Auditorium led to him being a random victim of a robbery attempt that turned violent.
Now, with a fragment of the bullet that wounded him still in his body – just one of the “wandering stars” of the book’s title – he becomes yet another in the family line of addicts. It starts with prescription painkillers but gets much worse when he befriends Sean, a schoolmate who has just found out he has Indigenous ancestors. Sean has no emotional connection to that heritage at all, but he does have a father who abandoned a job as a pharmacist to become a DIY drug dealer.
Soon Sean and Orvil are addicted to whatever random stew of opioids and hallucinogens Sean’s dad cooks up. Orange depicts it with convincing realism, but that unfortunately bogs down the book’s pace for a while – in fiction, as in real life, addiction is moments of heightened experience combined with long bouts of tedium.
But Orvil finds his way past it, and the book recovers as well, moving to a surprising conclusion as each member of the Red Feather family finds a unique way forward. As Opal says, “Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.”