In his sophomore novel, Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange grapples with cultural inheritance and identity. The novel begins with the 1864 Sand Creek massacre—and traces the descendants of one of the survivors, Jude Star, through generations reaching the present moment. After the massacre, Jude and his children are forced to attend colonial schools, in which white settlers of Colorado work to establish hegemony and the total destruction of native culture through violence and erasure. The novel proves the logical fallacy of the schools’ existence, and underscores the impossibility of simply discarding pieces of people’s identity. As Orange writes, “all the Indian children who were ever Indian children never stopped being Indian children … whose Indian children went on to have Indian children.”
The generations that follow Star are families of all different types—many broken by violence, addiction, or poverty. Each member of the family grapples with the forced assimilation of their ancestors in their own way, some unconsciously, but all living with this inherited grief and loss. Orange traces the ways that the family identity shifts over time, how younger generations begin losing sight of traditions but always feel a spiritual connection with their culture that extends past their own lived experience. Orange takes what could be a classic intergenerational epic, and turns it into a fresh and modern polyphonic narrative about Natives living in the America that readers will recognize as their own.
Star’s descendants, eventually called Bear Shields and then Red Feathers, are not only grappling with their family legacy but with their own very personal set of problems. One is a grandmother whose alcoholism has prevented her from being involved in her grandchildren’s lives, one is a young man who was injured in a sudden act of gun violence in his community (the focus of Orange’s debut novel, There There), another is a victim of the opioid epidemic and the proliferation of pain killers. Some hold their tribal identities close, while others don’t even realize they’re Native until they get the results from a DNA test. Orange weaves together a family story about those who are plagued not only by physical violence but also the psychological violence of cultural erasure.
The vignettes of each character that Orange deploys are an accumulation of the themes in previous vignettes, and even as he travels farther and farther away from 1864, there is a sense of narrative building blocks coming together to bind the characters together. Orange has conjured a novel that celebrates the resilience culture and inheritance in the face of unimaginable violence—and manages to hold space for nuanced familial relationships. Wandering Stars is an achievement of the form, a novel that manages to locate the singular joy of kinship and belonging that can only exist when the complications of identity and culture are honored rather than smoothed over.