Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange review – tapestry of colonial trauma is harrowing yet healing
Survivors’ stories provide gritty testament to the moral confusion of life in the aftermath of atrocity in the Pulitzer-nominated Native American’s eye-opening second novel
Tommy Orange, a Californian of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, has previously spoken of his desire to write fiction about Native Americans living in the here and now, not a romanticised past. As one character in his new novel has it: “Everyone only thinks we’re from the past, but then we’re here, but they don’t know we’re still here, so… it’s like we’re in the future. Like time travellers would feel.”
Orange’s debut, There There, unspooled as oral testimony following a dozen Native and mixed-race protagonists ahead of a powwow violently disrupted by a troubled addict with a 3D-printed pistol. His compact but capacious new novel – another polyvocal panorama, both prequel and sequel – describes the attack’s aftermath from the point of view of its college-age victim, Orvil Red Feather, but not before chronicling six generations of his bloodline, beginning with his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jude Star, a boyhood survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers, approved by Theodore Roosevelt “in spite of certain most objectionable details”, an epigraph tells us.
