‘You will ask the librarian what novels are written by Indian people and she will tell you that she doesn’t think there are any,’ reflects Victoria Bear Shield, a Native single mother in Tommy Orange’s polyphonic second novel. It is 1954, in America, and she is working out how to rear her baby daughter so that the child is not puzzled, as she herself was, by being ‘the brownest person in every room’. Seventy years later, one would hope that the librarian’s knowledge of indigenous writers would include at least Orange’s own work and that of Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich.
Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and his first novel, There There (2018), was one of Barack Obama’s books of the year and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Wandering Stars was inspired by his finding a news-paper clipping that mentioned ‘my tribe being in Florida in 1875’. He was shocked, but it transpired that members of his tribe were imprisoned in a Florida jail that became a model for the boarding schools where Native children were later coerced into adopting white culture. The jail is depicted in the opening scenes of this novel, and these pages are grotesquely powerful.
It is a shame that the latter half, entitled ‘Aftermath’ and set in 2018, lacks that fluency. It features the descendants of characters from the early part of the book, including some who also appeared in There There. In this way, Orange’s second novel is both a prequel and a sequel to his first.
Wandering Stars is dedicated to ‘anyone surviving and not surviving this thing called and not called addiction’, and Orange has spoken about how everyone in his family, including himself, has a problem with drugs.
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