Tommy Orange

What does it mean to be an oppressed minority in a land where your people have lived for centuries? How can you contend with a government bent on your extermination and stealing your homeland? How can you define an identity when the dominant group fails to recognize your culture and traditions or sentimentalizes them for entertainment? Can you attain a sense of belonging from family ties and ancestral connections? Should you actively rebel or passively check out with substance abuse? Echoes of these questions arise repeatedly in places where versions of genocide have been practiced. In this remarkable novel, Tommy Orange focuses on how these questions reverberate in the Native American community.

He views the issues through the lens of one indigenous lineage—Star/Bear Shield/Red Feather—and follows it over a century and a half. He begins with the unprovoked and brutal massacre of indigenous people by US troops in 1864 at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory. He follows this atrocity by telling of the unjust incarceration of Indians under inhumane conditions in St. Augustine, Florida, and their re-education at Indian schools, where Native children often were physically, sexually, and emotionally abused under the guise of forced assimilation. Although the telling of these events is important for understanding the historical context of the story, this half of the book is less nuanced than the latter that deals with descendants living in Oakland, California. This part takes up where Orange’s previous novel ended—with the random shooting of Orvil while dancing at a powwow. The matriarch, Opal, is now caring for her ne’er-do-well half-sister, Jacquie and her three grandsons, Orvil, Loother, and Lony. This part of the novel follows these characters as they contend with the myriad of issues facing indigenous people today.

Orange uses a non-linear structure with frequent shifts in narrative style and perspective. Moreover, he reiterates his themes in multiple contexts. Although these approaches can be unsettling for readers, Orange succeeds in creating fully formed and nuanced characters along with enough action to be fully engaging. One can’t help but leave this novel with new insights into the complex nature of life as a Native American in the United States today.… (más)

This was not an easy novel for me to read, but at the same time is engrossing and important. It’s full of raw, uncomfortable truths, heartaches, addiction, depression, but also gives us stories of recovery, family, perseverance, and hope.

I had to skip and skim through the first third, knowing about the history of violence and repression and genocide, with all the horrible things that happened to Native Americans and still continue to happen, with all the horrors I didn’t have the nerve to read in detail.

The remainder of the book, the story of the family built by the two sisters Opal and Jacquie, the two "grandmothers" for the three Red Feather brothers, was heartrending but beautiful.

Orange has the skill to weave his stories together while sometimes skipping from character to character, from time to time, or place to place without, somehow, ever breaking continuity.

Much happens inside someone’s head, in a stream of consciousness in the first person, or even with their words told by an outside observer. Much is told skillfully in dialogue that shows more than the words themself say. Orange is instructing us while entertaining us, in ways that just feel right.… (más)