A piercing look at ‘urban Indians’

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 is imprisoned.

Released from prison, Jude marries, develops a drinking problem but overcomes it, and has a son, Charles, who ends up in Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. His experiences there are so horrific 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 greataunt, Opal.

Orvil is trying to heal after the incident that came at the end of “There There”: His attempt to connect with his Cheyenne identity in a dance at a powwow led to him being a random victim of a robbery attempt that turned violent.

With a fragment of the bullet that wounded him still in his body, he becomes yet another in the family line of addicts.

But Orvil finds his way past it, and the book moves 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.”

FICTION