Scars of the past | Review of Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, longlisted for Booker Prize 2024

“Kill the Indian, save the man” — that’s what Brigadier-General Richard Henry Pratt (1840-1924), superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, meant by Americanising Native Indians. Under the garb of cultural assimilation, Pratt advised methods to “civilise” the “savage” Native Indians, a licensed cultural erasure supported by the American government. “More years at war with Indians than as a nation. Three hundred and thirteen,” writes Tommy Orange, an author of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, in the prologue to his 2024 Booker-longlisted novel Wandering Stars.

Divided into three parts, the novel — part prequel, non-sequel sequel to his award-winning debut novel There, There (2018) — features some of the principal characters (Jacquie Red Feather, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, etc.) from its predecessor. However, Wandering Stars is comparatively epic in scope and ambitious in its execution. It spans a nearly two-century period, tracing the lives of six generations of Native Americans, beginning with the story of Jude Star. 

A mute, Star was taken, “shackled in iron chains”, to be “civilised” by Pratt. He notes the following about the Sand Creek massacre of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people by the U.S. Army in 1864: “Everything that had been before what happened at Sand Creek went back inside the earth, deep into the singular stillness of land and death.” This is a glimpse into Orange’s technique of fusing creative non-fiction elements into his imaginative retelling of the past.

Tess Gunty, author of The Rabbit Hutch (2022), aptly notes that “Orange writes with a historian’s attention to detail and a poet’s attention to language.” The former is what several authors who attempt historical fiction are able to do; however, it’s the rigour of storytelling that helps elevate the point they want to make, which is where most falter, but not Orange. 

For instance, here’s what Star reflects when Pratt makes the jailed Indians “perform for the white people”: “We performed ourselves, made it look authentic for the sake of performing authenticity. Like being was for sale, and we’d sold ours. I even danced in one. Pretended to know something I didn’t. It didn’t matter what I did, white people wouldn’t know the difference. Eventually, I didn’t either, it seemed none of us did.” 

It is this dual-ness that Orange champions in his prose. His intellectual exercise of using language here and rendering voice to his characters isn’t at the cost of the characters’ intuitive intelligence. In fact, he replenishes the conventional wisdom and contextualises it for present-day readers.

Author Tommy Orange | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Be it the way he writes about Jude’s son Charles’ memories of being a “centreless map” or several Native Indians’ association with freckles, or a hint of unprocessed grief that percolates several characters’ life journeys, each narrative arc in this novel tries to search for “a story [a Native Indian] was a part of, that spoke to the purpose of [their] life”, for that’s what you eventually end up doing when you find yourself a “prisoner of a long war that didn’t stop even when it stopped”.

But it’s not only the past but also the way the author writes about present-day battles — depression, addiction, identity crisis — that will engage readers. For example, Sean and Orvil’s love for music and both being always high (and there’s an unmissable, distinct bro-coded homo-sociality that blurs the boundaries here) would remind a few of the EDM band The Blaze’s viral single from the album Territory, Virile (2017). 

However, most strikingly, there’s something that Orange notes in the beginning when Opal Viola Bear Shield is talking to her unborn child about “leaving the living”. The author returns to this unique phraseology when he mentions Opal’s grand-nephew Orvil’s preference to not use “suicide”, or “overdosing”, as it implies a “mistake”.

Orange writes, “[Orvil]’d always wanted better words for what it felt like to live, and to suffer, and to love it all so recklessly as to hate how it couldn’t love you back the same. Leaving the living, that was how he wanted to think of it. It felt within reach, the option, he could leave.” By writing about addiction in this manner, Orange is initiating a new conversation on addiction and the language one uses to skirt around it, making Wandering Stars an adequately placed book to raise questions that demand to be platformed.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based queer writer and cultural critic. Instagram/X: @writerly_life.