Review: WANDERING STARS

Title: Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Book Beginnings quote, from the Prologue

Friday56 quote from page 40, last page of the preview:

Summary: Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864, through the Carlisle Indian Industrial Schools, to beyond the shattering aftermath of the shooting of Orvil Red Feather's shooting in Tommy Orange's brilliant book, There There.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together after the shooting that nearly took the life of her nephew Orvil. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, Lony, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting by secretly cutting himself and enacting blood rituals that he hopes will connect him to his Cheyenne heritage. Opal is equally adrift, experimenting with Ceremony and peyote, searching for a way to heal her wounded family (Publisher).

Review: Tommy Orange opens Wandering Stars with a dedication which frames one of the main themes of the book -- addiction:

The book is both a prequel and a sequel of There There. Readers are introduced to all the family members in that first book and understand the theme is about what life is like for Urban Indians. Then in Wandering Stars we realize the tentacles of racism and the National degradation that happened centuries ago to Native Americans still taints lives today. Drug addiction, poverty, alienation are terrible, predictable side effects.

Wandering Stars is a hard book because looking at the true history isn't easy, especially when we have to counter a message we've been fed a steady diet of about the Native American experience, "Yes it was bad, but it was along time ago, so get over it!" The quotes from the prologue and page 40 tell us a bit of what to expect. Native American children weren't treated like other children and when they were sent to the Indian Schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial school those in charge tried to "kill the Indian, to save the man."  Imagine being told that your culture, your language, even the way you wear your hair is bad and in order to be "good" you should just melt into the dominant culture and not make a fuss.

I honestly wish that every American was required to read Tommy Orange. The way he consolidates history, the history of indigenous people, is so crisp and sharp, it is impossible to misunderstand or not have a correction to prior thinking about historical "facts." This book has a double message, that about the horrors of addiction, which clearly is not just a problem for one race of people. But as the character Junior, in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie, says the Tolstoy line in Anna Karenina “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” isn't true. "All Native American families are unhappy for the same reason," Junior says, "because of alcohol." I'd amend that statement to "drugs and/or alcohol" since several of the characters in this book are addicted to the new, more powerful depressants like fentanyl and other opioids. 

Fortunately Orvil makes it out the other end in Wandering Stars, and finds healing and wholeness in exercise and in his own culture. There is a message of hope to cling to.

Rating: 4.25 stars.

 

-Anne