In 2006 the Ojibwe writer David Treuer made a bold claim in Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual: “The sentiment (and it is a sentiment) that Native American literature should be defined by the ethnicity of its producers … says more about politics and identity than it does about literature. This is especially true, and especially clear, when we see that our books are constructed of the same materials available to anyone else. Ultimately, the study of Native American fiction should be the study of style.” I thought of Treuer as I was reading Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, which wanders purposefully across a zodiac of techniques as it recounts the calamitous history of one Indigenous family, from Colorado’s barbaric Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 to contemporary Oakland, California — the novel is style all the way down, unleashing a quiet fury amid its craft.
Born and raised in Oakland, Orange, a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, electrified critics with There There, his 2018 debut, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the American Book Award and the NBCC’s Leonard prize. Wandering Stars opens with a terse prologue of the harms done to Native peoples, similar to the opening of the previous book, but then strikes out on its own terms, connecting characters from the Bear Shield and Red Feather families to a broader generational arc.
In the wake of Sand Creek. young Jude Star escapes on horseback with another boy, setting off a treacherous journey that will presage odysseys to come. Jude refuses to talk, but his fantastical imagination hooks the reader from the get-go. He ends up in the captive care of a Theodore Roosevelt acolyte, Richard Henry Pratt, at Fort Marion in Florida, a Spanish Castillo repurposed as a training center to transform Natives into good Christians. There’s an evangelical quality to Pratt; Orange quotes him in an epigraph: “In Indian civilization I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”
Jude’s baptism is fiery: he recoils from the white man’s gaze, dodging his bullets. His son, Charles Star, will be shipped off to the notorious Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, where a Theodore Roosevelt acolyte will try to beat the Native out of him. He yearns for his best friend and later his lover, Opal Viola Bear Shield, whom he meets again in Oakland. She’s a domestic in an oppressive household. The pain inflicted on Charles’s body nudges him to a laudanum addiction, a casualty of racist policies.
Orange’s tool box is immense. His sentences are vigorous, studded with gemlike bits of history. He passes the baton from generation to generation, shifting perspectives to disrupt the narrative, keeping us gloriously off balance. Opal dies in childbirth and her daughter, Victoria, is raised by a white couple and called “Vicky,” which she hates. She has two daughters, Opal and Jacquie, whom readers will recognize from There There. Even as cancer stalks Victoria, she joins her radicalized daughters in the 1969 Native takeover of the “prison-island” Alcatraz.
Orange structures Wandering Stars in episodes strung like beads on an abacus, counting out the tally of slaughter, dispossession, and admixture with other populations. He pinches grammar and syntax, tweaks switchbacks and inversions, unrolls single-sentence paragraphs with cadences like a drum beat. It’s this formal inventiveness that may be the novel’s master stroke. Consider the wordplay in this paragraph, as an adopted boy grapples with tragedy when his middle-aged white mother succumbs to early-onset dementia.
“Grace was his mom’s actual name, but everyone only ever called her Gracie, which felt like a cutesy form of grace, or meaning, only with some grace, like grace-ish, which Sean felt like grace needed to be full to be true grace, didn’t it? But she was gone, had left Sean gracelessly, had actually fallen from grace, away from the meaning of her own name because he couldn’t even recognize the person he was losing as he was losing her.”
Orange’s leitmotifs are subtle but meted throughout: coughs, seasons, fruit, videos, dominoes, the color blue, constellations from the book’s title. Wandering Stars tests the limits of English, as if other, unheard languages are exerting a gravitational pull on his sentences like dark matter or the multiverse. I don’t know a lick of Cheyenne, or any Indigenous tongue, but I’d bet that he is infusing his chapters with patterns from other languages to create a new literary idiom. The effect is striking and begs to be read aloud.
Halfway through the novel, Orange settles into the story of the melded Bear Shield and Red Feather family in Oakland circa 2018, just following the shootings at the powwow, There There‘s dramatic climax. The adolescent Orvil is recovering from a gunshot wound, shrapnel embedded in his body. His great-aunt or “fake grandma,” Opal Bear Shield, continues to juggle care of him and his brothers with her job as a mail carrier; she’s also harboring a secret that will peel away the skin of this fragile family. Her half-sister, Jacquie Red Feather, the boys’ biological grandmother, is working hard on her recovery in the aftermath of her daughter’s suicide. The youngest Red Feather sees his identity, and perhaps his fate, in Opal’s domino games: “Lony dreamed about dominoes. He dreamed he was a domino tile, and that there were lines of dominoes as far as he could see, falling in rows that seemed to get closer and closer to him. In the dream he didn’t know when the line would come and knock him over and end his life. He knew that being knocked over meant that, and that the line was his family line, that something had begun long before he was born that was coming to knock him down, but that this was true of everyone, each family line falling down on top of the living when they die, all that they couldn’t carry, couldn’t resolve, couldn’t figure out, with all their weight.”
Wandering Stars leans into its own ironies: white Americans have plagued Indigenous people with drug and alcohol addiction as surely as they have seized land and raped women and spread contagion. While Treuer and scholars such as Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal have emphasized Native agency and resilience, seeking creative opportunity, Orange follows a script made richer by outrage, mocking riddles posed by DNA or the failed strategies of trauma-support groups. (We sense both sorrow and mischief as he exposes vacuous therapy-speak.) Addiction is a kind of chromosome passed from parent to child, as Orvil mulls: “He had the thought he was becoming addicted. This wasn’t new language. He’d had it used against him for video games and for phones, for screens in general. And he knew he came from addict blood. His mom’s brain had been wired wrong, and her parents’ brains and their parents’ brains all the way back a long descending line of Indian heads figuring it our as best they could. Past family members and the ancestors were constantly sending their blessings and curses down through time from beyond before, that gave his present its particular bent, its dimness, its light, its scream, and its song, but also its sometimes dead silence.”
The Opioid crisis tightens its grip on Wandering Stars, in the vein of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead or Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! The struggles are real, the relapses ever-present. There’s a loose strand about a rogue pharmacist, but Orange stitches it back into his narrative. The book, then, is a stellar installment in what promises to be a grand epic, dovetailing with revisionist scholarship as it probes the personal costs of Manifest Destiny.
[Published by Knopf on February 27, 2024, 336 pages, $29.00 Us hardcover]