Published by Harvill Secker, 2024, 317 pages.

“We come from prisoners of a long war that didn’t stop even when it stopped.”

In 2018, Tommy Orange published his debut novel, There There, which follows a group of Native Americans in Oakland, California, as they prepare for a powwow. Wandering Stars, in a sense, nests that story, as it traces the history of one of the families in the first book, and then picks up from where There There left off.

The family is that of Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, who, when we meet her in There There, is looking after the three grandsons of her sister Jacqui Red Feather. This book tells the story of Opal’s ancestors, caught up in the massacre of Sand Creek,[1] and the indoctrination of Native American children in special boarding schools.

It is a harrowing tale.

The massacres, the subjugation of an entire people, the culling of great herds of buffalo—buffalo were one of the chief sources of food for the Native Americans—were all done systematically and in cold blood. The children were taken from their parents and put into schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where they were taught to abandon all the customs and knowledge that they had grown up with. “To become not-Indian the way they meant it at Carlisle meant you killed the Indian to save the man, as was said by the man who made the school, which meant the Indian children would have to do all the dying.”

The Native Americans captured by the US Army were made to dress in standard uniforms and relinquish everything that made them who they were. They earned a little money by selling souvenirs to white people and performing their “Indianness” for them: a rich culture debased to the level of a street show.

The story starts with Jude Star, who is at the Sand Creek massacre and manages to get away. He is captured and sent to a prison-castle presided over by Richard Henry Pratt, who later supervised the Carlisle School, where Jude’s son Charles was sent. It follows the family through the generations, until we get to the final section: the present day, the aftermath of the powwow. A powwow that ended in a shooting, which left a star-shaped bullet embedded in Orvil Red Feather, Jacqui’s grandson.

The story of Orvil, his brothers Loother and Lony, and their grandmothers Opal and Jacqui is at the centre of this book. Opal is trying to hold the family together, but Orvil is dealing with the trauma of the shooting by dosing himself with medication. All of them are drowning under the weight of their grief, of their past that stretches back over time, and they are all trying to do it alone. But as Opal says, “surviving isn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.” What will it take for them to get past the trauma and find each other again?

This is a powerful book, a story about genocide, an attempt to wipe out the heritage and culture of an entire people, leaving them without a compass or the ability to ground themselves. One of the results of this is addiction: Jude’s drinking, Charles’s morphine habit, Jacqui’s alcoholism, Orvil’s addiction to painkillers, which starts out to help him deal with the pain after he was shot, and the most heartbreaking—Orvil’s little brother Lony, who is cutting himself in blood ceremonies that he has invented to try and connect with his heritage.

The damage done is reflected in Charles Star, who was sent to Carlisle, where he was subjected to beatings and starvation, shamed for still being an Indian in spite of the teachers’ efforts to Christianize and “civilize” him. He is half-white, so he is teased even by the children in the school. “Charles Star’s memories come and go as they please. They are a broken mirror, through which he only ever sees himself in pieces. … He has forgotten that he has forgotten things on purpose.” But it is Charles who writes down the family’s story, whose pages are found by Opal, all those years later, and gives her a sense of what has gone before.

Tommy Orange writes beautifully. As I was reading the book, I would stop and re-read certain passages or sentences, just for their power and ability to convey so much emotion. Like the description of Charles: “He is in his shack there at the back of the orchard, wasted like so much fallen fruit.”

This is a brilliant book, and you can read it as a stand-alone. But do read There There—together, the two novels tell a devastating story that also has a shred of hope. One of my best reads this year.

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[1] The Sand Creek massacre took place in 1864, when 675 US Army troops destroyed a village of Cheyenne and Arapaho people in Colorado. Estimates of those killed vary; it was probably 150, most of them women and children. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre)

Read my review of There There by Tommy Orange.