Tommy Orange was in Sweden, promoting a translated edition of his first novel, There There, when inspiration struck for a second time. Orange’s debut was published in 2018 to enormous acclaim: it was selected as one of Barack Obama’s books of the year, listed as a Pulitzer prize finalist and won the American Book award. The pressure to follow that early success must have been immense. But then, visiting a Swedish museum, “I saw this newspaper clipping about my tribe being in Florida in 1875. And I know enough about my tribal history to know that we were never in Florida.”
Except, it turns out, they were. Orange, born in Oakland, California in 1982, is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. Members of his tribe, he discovered, were held as prisoners in a Florida jail that became the blueprint for the notorious “boarding schools” in which Native children were forcibly assimilated into white culture.
That prison made its way into the opening of Orange’s second novel, Wandering Stars. In it, a young man, barely more than a boy, wakes to find the bad dreams he has been having for weeks coming true: a massacre is taking place, and it is all he can do to escape with his life. After a few itinerant years fending for themselves and with no home to return to, he and his exhausted survivor-companions turn themselves in, having heard that their surrender will be met with food and shelter. Instead, they are shackled in chains and transported hundreds of miles to a prison fortress. For the next three years, they are stripped of their identities, dressed in military uniforms, made to learn an alien language and religion, and on occasion paraded before the locals, part conquest, part curious entertainment.
This violent and grotesque episode is drawn from what was done to the southern Cheyenne people at Sand Creek in Colorado in 1864. But his inclusion of the postscript to the massacre itself – the incarceration of Cheyenne people in Florida under the command of military officer Richard Henry Pratt – was inspired by that museum visit.
“He thought it was so effective to put these prisoners through military training and teach them Christianity and English,” Orange explains over Zoom from his home in Oakland, California, “that he decided it was a good idea to try to do it to all Native children in the country, and start up these boarding schools everywhere. It’s quite the logical leap – and a cruel leap – to think that what you would do to prisoners of war you should do to the children, but those were the times and I wanted to try to find a way to write about it because my tribe was at its origin.” Chillingly, Orange tells me he came to understand that “Pratt was not the worst of the people around at the time. He was doing his best to try to figure out how to allow that these people survive in some way, because a lot of what was happening was closer to genocide.”
The resulting novel is a mosaic of stories that illuminates the origins and effects of transgenerational trauma; after examining the fates of the victims of Sand Creek and their subsequent imprisonment, its longer second part, entitled simply “Aftermath”, takes the reader to 2018, and to their descendants. Some of these figures will be familiar to readers of There There, most notably the teenage Orvil Red Feather, whom we last saw caught up in the crossfire of a shooting at the Big Oakland Powwow, and his family. At the end of There There, it was not clear that Orvil would survive; now we witness his faltering attempts to continue living.
***
Wandering Stars is dedicated to “anyone surviving and not surviving this thing called and not called addiction”, and explores with subtlety and determination the intricate way in which those bearing the pain of past and present come to depend on substances that appear to offer them respite. For Orange, it is a recognisable story: “In my life, my whole family has had problems with addiction, including myself,” he tells me. “I’ve just seen it play out in ways that compelled me to write about it. I also wanted to give it complexity and to give an understanding to the reader as to why people might end up being addicted. There are stereotypes about Native people and alcohol, for instance, where it’s just like, they have a weakness for it. People conveniently want to think that, because they don’t want to look at why somebody might be going to something to stop the pain or help with whatever they’re trying to cover up or not think about.”
He goes on to explain that his father and his sisters have suffered from alcoholism, and while Orange himself has avoided the extremes, he too has struggled with drugs and alcohol. But in the novel, and in conversation, he is alive to the deadening effect of talking about addiction in reductive and simplistic terms: “Drugs often get this escapism and numbness reporting from the outside. But I think some people who have experienced trauma, they are already numb in their body since they were children, especially if there’s childhood trauma. Their body has numbed them before they get to the substance, and then the substance actually lets them feel something.”
Orvil Red Feather, who becomes dependent on painkillers, reflects on how they make him feel better “because he felt in ways he hadn’t allowed himself to feel before … brave and confident, like he could feel what he had kept hidden before without even meaning to”. At the same time, he yearns for a return to the normality of life before he was shot, “even if normal was never all that good in the first place”.
This focus on the suppression of feelings characterises Orange’s attempts to narrate the realities of life for the Native American community, and particularly those living in urban settings. “For the past 20 years, 80% of Native people have been living in cities. So that’s most people living out lives where what they relate to is being in cities; that means working in offices, taking buses, driving cars, having cell phones, having online lives, using dating apps. All of these stories about our relationship to these things are missing. And so we spend two-thirds of Wandering Stars back in Oakland: I tried to write about what it’s like to be a contemporary person, a young person living right now, because there’s so much absence of our lives in cities, even though it’s such a presence in reality.”
***
Orange still lives in the city, with his wife, Kateri, and son, Felix. The son of a white mother and a Native father, he is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, the state that his father came from and which he visited as a child. Writing came into his life relatively late: his first love was roller hockey, and he excelled at the sport, playing at a national level between the ages of 14 and 24. After he gained a degree in sound arts, he wore “a lot of different hats” at a large nonprofit Native organisation in Oakland which, combined with working at Gray Wolf Books, a secondhand bookshop just outside the city, helped to kickstart his writing career.
At the nonprofit, he ran three-day storytelling workshops, in which people would first speak about their experiences in an informal story circle, then convert them into scripts and short films. It was an instructive process for Orange, who noticed how often the narratives lost their power when they were written down. “I would end up reconnecting them with their natural storytelling ability,” he explains. “I would guide them back to the story that they told in the story circle, which was always the best one. And when they would go to write it, the thing would become dead, or they would hover high above it, or they would speak in generalities rather than specifics.”
It was here that Orange began to write his first novel – its title taken from Gertrude Stein’s comment on Oakland, in which she lived as a child, that “there was no there there” – eventually reading parts of it out to groups. By this point, he was also reading widely and prodigiously, although when I ask him whether, like some of the 19th-century characters in Wandering Stars, he immersed himself in the American canon and writers such as Herman Melville and Mark Twain, he laughs. He was simply giving his characters the books that would have most likely been to hand at the time, he says, adding, “I don’t like the classics very much, if I’m being honest.”
Instead, he developed a taste for writing in translation, reading Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Andrei Platonov and the Swiss writer Robert Walser. He didn’t start reading Native literature until later, but now speaks with admiration of writers such as Louise Erdrich and his contemporary, the Canadian First Nation writer Terese Mailhot. He is cautiously optimistic about the increasing visibility of Native writers, artists and performers across cultural spheres, citing Lily Gladstone’s recent Oscar nomination for her role in Killers of the Flower Moon, hoping that the more high profile the achievement, the more industries will be willing to back projects.
“We’re a whole group of people who never saw themselves reflected in these ways that allowed a kind of dreaming,” he says. “If you never see a Native person as an actor, or as a visible writer with success, it’s harder to dream that it’s something you could do. So I think there’s a kind of momentum building, and I truly hope it continues. Because if it gets bigger, and starts to get a sustainable kind of momentum and visibility point, it’ll just mean generations of growth.”
His own success has involved walking a fine line. He has been wary of becoming a spokesperson for “all of Native America”, insisting that “I can squarely claim to be from Oakland. I know about Oakland, that’s my experience. I read about Cheyenne people, and that’s who I am. And that’s what I can represent, because that’s who I am.” But at the same time, “there are commonalities among Native people that are important, and it is important for us to unify around them. They are anti-colonial statements or sentiments. There are ways that I have this readership, that Native people see themselves represented by me whether they’re my tribe or not, because we have common experience. So even though we’re not a monolith, there are ways that we’re connected that are important to always keep in mind and cultivate, while also not being flattened by the idea that we’re all the same.”
I wonder what is next for Orange. Will he return once again to the characters of There There and Wandering Stars? He jokes that while he’s not going to sign a legal and binding agreement not to, he thinks that after 12 years of writing about them, he’s “done with that world” and is ready to leave them behind: “But if I run out of stuff years down the line, and I need something to write about, it’s always there.”
He is hard at work on a third novel, which he describes as lighter in tone, and he has also written an original screenplay. Meanwhile, as a composer of instrumental music, he’s written four pieces that will appear on a Spotify playlist as examples of what Orvil Red Feather might be listening to as he continues to make his way through an uncertain and at times hostile environment. There There is also slated to appear as a TV show and is now in “pre-production land, so I don’t know how far it will go. But that would be a great opportunity for people in front of the camera and behind the camera for representation.” It might be, then, that although Orange is done with the world of his first two novels, they might not yet be done with him.
• Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
