“I don’t think stories were made to comfort. I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.”
The John Adams Institute is honored to welcome Native American novelist Tommy Orange back to Amsterdam for his highly anticipated second book, Wandering Stars. Orange broke onto the American literary scene with his award-winning novel There There in 2018, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In addition to continuing his literary career, he has become a teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Wandering Stars is a hard read. Orange tells the story of the fictional Star family through the ages, providing an aerial view of the most important moments of Native American history. The subject matter, though dramatized, is confronting. Through a series of snapshots, we get to know the Star’s, their history and their ancestors.
With his characteristic piercing and poetic prose, Orange lays out the stakes in the novel’s opening pages. The story begins in 1864, when soldiers of the Third Colorado Cavalry attack and destroyed a village of displaced Cheyenne and Arapaho who have been chased away from their homelands by encroaching settlers. Native American warriors, elders, women and children attempted to flee from what would come to be known as the Sand Creek Massacre. Few survived, and those who did, were scattered, separated from their families and cultures.
From the blood-soaked plains of Colorado to the streets of Oakland, California, Orange finds hope amongst the darkness. Opal Viola and Charles Star envision a life for their descendants away from the institutional violence they suffered; a dream kept alive generations later and despite all odds.
In Wandering Stars, Orange explores a central question: what does it mean to be Native American when your inheritance is overwhelmingly complicated and torturous? And perhaps more importantly: what does it take not only to survive, but thrive?
