Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange review – wounds of history
The Native American story is painfully alive in an impressive second novel that moves from 19th-century massacres to present-day Oakland
The Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s astonishing 2018 debut novel, There There, offered a kaleidoscopic portrait of urban Native American identity. Composed of an all-Native cast, it ruminated on power, storytelling, dispossession, erasure and historical memory. The novel’s off-the-wall structure placed its central event – a mass shooting at an Oakland powwow – at the book’s end, leaving its aftermath largely unattended.
Now comes an emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel, Wandering Stars. A companion to There There, it brings news about Orvil Red Feather, who was hit by a bullet while dancing at the event. It tells, too, the story of Orvil’s younger brothers Loother and Lony; their great-aunt Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, in whose care they have been since losing their drug-addicted mother to suicide; and Jacquie Red Feather, Opal’s half-sister and the boys’ estranged “real grandma”, a recovering alcoholic who is living “her sobriety, moment by moment, step by step, day by day”. The novel’s first sections, however, belong not to these people but to their ancestors, beginning with Jude Star, a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek massacre.
