6.27: Wandering Stars – Tommy Orange and the Sovereign Center

 

Breaking the Mirror of Omelas

For some weeks now, I have to admit I’ve grown a bit discontent with the dilemma Le Guin has created for us. As I said some months ago, it’s powerful and demanding on us, posed as it is in classic philosophy and literary traditions, compelling us to answer it on its own terms. But you know, we’ve tested it, haven’t we? We’ve pushed at it back and forth and found some alternative responses which are sometimes more but often less satisfying. 

I realized there is a fundamental flaw in Le Guin’s metaphor. Yes, she wants us to see the link to global capitalism. But when we make that expansive move, we turn the victim into a prop. We freeze the ‘Suffering Child’ as a static, mute, defenseless object locked in a basement while the privileged class celebrates. In the same way, we recklessly place everyone who is a victim of injustice as a passive, uncomprehending victim locked away. This wasn’t Le Guin’s intention–for her, the child and the dilemma are a disruption to the privileged life, the “turd in the punchbowl”—but if we’re not careful we see her child too literally as object.

To be sure, there are very real children vulnerable and suffering in the world, but we’ve been talking about the parallel a bit differently, as an allegory for the underclass. And, not to put too fine a point on this, the “Suffering Child” understood this way is a Western fantasy of victimhood: the victim is an “object”—always suffering, always childlike—for us to choose about, to save or rescue, or to walk away from. 

Let me see how plainly I can speak this. Victims, people, aren’t props for white or male or Western saving or decision-making or philosophizing. We saw this more extensively in our discussion of Nigerian literature and last time with Erdrich’s The Night Watchman. We see it more clearly still in Tommy Orange’s book Wandering Stars . . . and heck, just about all of the literature from the indigenous world, from the Global South, from the underclass wherever we find it. 

So today, and for most of the remainder of the season, we’re about to make a shift. I want to stop asking “Would you walk away?” as if that choice is all we must consider. The very posing of the question is a privileged position. Instead, we might do better to meet more clearly the injustice the Western world has too often authored directly, see what it looks like.

The dungeon that Le Guin’s fantastical allegory proposes is not, after all, a room. And the suffering, as we learned these past weeks, is not always a current crisis but instead the trauma of a history which lives still in the present. For Tommy Orange, the closet of suffering is inside us, embedded as history, culture, identity, blood. 

So let’s make ourselves a promise not to think of the suffering child as a physical space where we can unlock the doors and everything will be fine again. And let’s not imagine even that we are rescuing the uncomprehending victim from anything. All of that is how a Western or Colonial Gaze may understand the scene, but it’s also the same gaze that created the injustice in the first place, used it as an essential ingredient for its own lifestyle of comfort. 

Let’s better understand what Gerald Vizenor called “Survivance.”

Intro Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I think my Garden Wall is missing.

 

Some Spatial Theory

At the start of this season’s Journey, we talked at length about the binary opposition. When we first spoke of the nature of otium and negotium and William James, I said:

I’ve always had something against simple binaries, in any event. Every time we say something like good vs. evil or Left vs. Right or Skywalker vs. Skywalker, I get testy about the simplified universe we narrate to ourselves. I take it personally. 

But why shouldn’t I? And why shouldn’t all of us? When we talk about engaging with literature, we are talking about personally, aren’t we? We don’t mean, connect with the literature as an unemployed Harvard don or as a semi-literate penguin on the McDonald Islands. When we read, you and I, we invest ourselves in story and idea, us personally, individually. 

Stay or leave Omelas? And sure, we soon pushed against the two choices and found a third and fourth or fifth, dug underneath each one along the way. But then, I talked about Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” poem and the notion of the garden wall, and I went further still:

These are the consequences of this binary as our Western ideologyFrom Todd Gitlin and Antonio Gramsci, a system of beliefs—... More has traditionalized for us: this constructed otium, this pursuit of an ideal peace, is an obstacle, a cognitive limitation to the very ideal we seek. When it is applied to the Other, for Le Guin, it has worse qualities, still: it is a form of oppression. 

And so we harvest cows and wordsmith them as beef; pigs and wordsmith them as pork, hunt deer and call it venison. This is not an argument for vegetarianism or against hunting, but one where we create comforting language and myths for our behavior.

Oh. So if we’re not careful, we think too quickly of the Other as an underclass object for our action and choice. That’s partly what I mean by the Western or Colonial gaze. But we also have to see that if we can get past this way of thinking, new ideas open to us. When I spoke about the Six Lousy Questions I carried away from the short story, the binary opposition was still hanging out there:

Binary Relationships and Unimaginability: Our tendency to frame concepts or choices as having only two opposing parts (e.g., good vs. evil, Left vs. Right), which oversimplify complex realities. But when we escape these binary blind spots, we often get into new cognitive territory, perhaps beyond our imaginative capacity due to systemic, cultural, and ideological closure that a binary creates.

So why is it so important right now? Well, our earlier writers have all fashioned time and space as binaries. There is city and countryside, corruption and purity, noise and peace, past and present, civilization and wilderness. Otium and negotium. 

Tommy Orange isn’t in that same space. Now, I should take a moment to talk about this book, Wandering Stars, from 2024, which is both a prequel and sequel to his quite well-known first novel There There. More of a companion novel, then. And let’s get to the bottom line of reading this. Start with There There from 2018. Yes, technically, you can read Wandering Stars without the first experience, but frankly Orange has woven in so many methods of connection to the earlier book that you’ll appreciate it more fully with the earlier read. And, like Erdrich’s The Night Watchman, it’s so recent that I won’t be giving away the plot pieces today. But hopefully, I can offer some ways into reading it that will make the experience richer.

There There takes place in 2018. It’s loosely about a wide range of indigenous characters who make their way for different reasons to a powwow in Oakland California that ends in tragedy for many. Wandering Stars, though, begins in 1864, with a single survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre who is an ancestor to some of our later characters. He later gets imprisoned and placed in one of the first boarding schools created by the historical Richard Henry Pratt, someone who believed that we might quote “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.”

And it isn’t a spoiler to tell you what these schools were about. In fact, Orange begins his book with a Prologue that offers the historical background. The Carlisle School was the first of many such programs across the US and Canada designed to take the young indigenous and cut their hair and culture from them, forcing them to abandon language, dress, and beliefs. Christianity was substituted and different low-level trades were sometimes daily training, less often skills like math or science or anything that we might associate with schooling. Beatings, disease, neglect, and other abuses, often sexual, were common. As children, the casualty rate was said to be as high as being a soldier in one of the world wars. 

Then, Orange tells us, still in the Prologue, that 

All the Indian children who were ever Indian children never stopped being Indian children, and went on to have not nits but Indian children, whose Indian children went on to have Indian children, whose Indian children became American Indians, whose American Indian children became Native Americans, whose Native American children would call themselves natives, or indigenous, or NDNS, or the names of their sovereign nations, or the names of their tribes, and all too often would be told they weren’t the right kind of Indians to be considered real ones by too many Americans taught in schools their whole lives that the only real kinds of Indians were those long-gone Thanksgiving Indians who loved the pilgrims as if to death. 

But what is the authentic Cheyenne, then? The real Ojibwe? Does the Indian inside the man ever get killed or, as we discussed a bit last time with Simon Ortiz’s essay, does it simply change, adapt reactively and creatively to its experience?

This is where Orange is. We can already make the connection that we made last week about time and how the torus turns back on itself, over and over, and we’ll come back to Orange’s version of it. But Tommy Orange also offers us a conception of place, of space, that cannot be contained. 

What happened to those who endured and survived the boarding schools? What happens to their descendents? Like Thomas Wazhashk of The Night Watchman, also a product of these schools, they know English now as their own language. Over time, they move forward in their educations, finding more Western-traditional pathways for them. But they also carried the historical experience of their abuse, the enduring systemic damage which followed, the bureaucracy which continued its work to erase. As we said last week, the past is the present.

Orange envisions Pratt’s deathbed thoughts, but these are also a kind of confession for all of it, for the complete ignorance and impotence and ineptitude of those who created policy then or who fail to attend to it now:

There was no better plan. That was the only thing he could say, that sentence, but also the feeling, that Pratt had done all that he could, and that he was saying all that he could say on the matter, that the Indians got their chance with Pratt’s help, and that the US government got their chance with Pratt’s help, and if nothing else could come of it then what came of it, if the Indians didn’t turn out okay, and the US government could not see the Indian race for what they were, see their potential and give them what should have been their right, then it couldn’t be his fault because there was no better plan.

. . . There was no better way for it to have gone, Pratt’s attempted deliverance of the Indians from themselves to themselves, no better plan for America, no better plan for the Indians, no better plan, there was no better plan than that, he said to no one, and faced the wall. . . .

This section really hit me in my reading. We like to believe, I think—sometimes for our own peace of mind need to believe—that at least somewhere, no matter how awful the news becomes—that somewhere, someone with more knowledge and skills than ourselves has an idea and a plan, has thought it through, reflected upon it, weighed the options, made the best and most moral choices possible. Really, I have no idea why we convince ourselves that that’s true.

Maybe for the same reasons that we “imagine away” authentic Indian culture, render it invisible or a museum artifact.  We might argue, as I once believed, that the only authentic indigenous peoples were those still somehow managing to live on reservations with this past, and practice what few traditions they could retain. Orange doesn’t let us off with this, the out-of-sight, tucked-away-in-the-corner product of our history which surely must also be our own past-present. 

No, Orange’s setting for these two novels is Oakland, California, some of the most populous and urban neighborhoods in the United States. Reservations aren’t the only place where we find authentic indigenous life, and those that live in the city aren’t finding only loss of culture there. Besides, I’ll mention again: white folks like me have no business deciding what’s “authentic,” anyway. 

To explain this newer kind of community, one which will be important to understanding Orange, I think, is to consider the term “Native Hub,” coined by Winnebago scholar Renya Ramirez. She says that indigenous culture is not held to a location but is a mobile network of community. This is in keeping with the traditional portability of villages as needed, but it also became more essential as settler politics literally relocated these nations over and over, sometimes legislatively, sometimes violently. The culture is carried within the individual, and the hub is a meeting of these people to share it, wherever that happens. Survival depends on connection, those porous cultural borders, intertribal solidarity. We don’t walk away to find peace but gather together to build it. Therefore, the city is a collection point, not a diaspora. Oakland acts as a hub in Orange’s novels, and the Intertribal Friendship Center there is a kind of community archive. 

And if the culture is carried within, so then is the history, and so then must be reconciliation and action.

 

Monsters Within

If it helps to think of historical trauma as a prolonged and systemic external layering of injustices upon marginalized peoples, this is a fine place to begin. It’s a helluva lot better than simply saying something naive like “The Past is the Past” or “Time to Move On.” After all, the only people who usually say that are those who benefit most from escaping responsibility for it. AccountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More to it. But at least thinking of it as systemic recognizes that we have a complex set of economic and political mechanisms motivated by limiting or racist ideologies which perpetrate violence.

But I also want to make space for the trauma to be internalized across these generations as much as it is an external and temporal experience. In other words, as the culture shifts in generational responses to an 1864 massacre at Sand Creek and the prisons and boarding schools which follow, the later generations metastasize those experiences and build or adapt from there. Culture, both its joys and miseries, can be understood as “blood memory.” The injustice is within us. 

And so, many indigenous stories today are equally about this internal work as much as any political resistance. For Orange in Wandering Stars, the primary stories revolve around two of the youngest generation following the powwow tragedy, Orvil and Lony Red Feather. Their oldest brother, Loother, turns his energies to poetry and rap music, but Orvil and Lony have a more difficult time. 

The youngest Lony wonders at the absence of that traditional culture, challenges its relevance, and wonders aloud why people can’t just make up any traditions they want. He imagines superheroes with the power of invisibility, much as he imagines his people are. As skeptical as this appears, though, he also turns to self-harm, cutting himself. But this is not passive suffering. This is a desperate, physical attempt to find “superblood,” to locate the ancestors within the veins. Lony makes the “blood memory” concept nearly literal. Orange points out a few times, too, that one of the names for the Cheyenne are the “cut people,” though historically for different reasons.

Orvil, too, suffers largely through the book with addiction, first to prescribed pain killers and then on to heavier drugs. Alcohol is prominent in both of Orange’s books, as well, but the issue for any addiction is the same. It attempts to divert the mind from engaging the history or trauma, from meeting it meaningfully.

Yes, Wandering Stars thickens these stories for these boys, and we go into the novel anxious to discover if any will find a happy ending or a tragic one, especially if we are coming from reading There There first. But such endings are neither going to be spoiled here nor expected to be so easily packaged. People don’t work like fairy tales; history doesn’t end; and what’s needed isn’t merely survival.  What’s needed is a recovery of narrative, of authorship of the story. 

Survivance

Chippewa writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor offers us the term “survivance” to describe what has and must be done. This isn’t the same as survival, not merely endurance of the historical and contemporary burden of identity. It is, he says, “an active sense of presence” that rejects narratives of dominance, tragedy, and victimhood. 

When indigenous history is understood only through a lens of tragedy, or it’s portrayed only as victims as objects of white dominance, this grants power to the colonizer. Survivance refuses sentiments of tragedy and it absolutely rejects erasure and invisibility. Native presence is instead, continuous and evolving. As we’ve already discussed, culture is active, dynamic, and it is built as a sovereign literature, not in historical treaties and federal policies. 

Notice how Vizenor’s idea steps outside another binary. This isn’t the Richard Henry Pratt assimilate or die off choice. Those are choices offered by the white settler thinking. We might believe indigenous authenticity is dead and in some glass museum case, but an evolving, active, sovereign-minded indigeneity is out there writing. Pueblo storyteller Simon Ortiz from last week offers a similar concept, “continuance.” He says that in this way, endings do not take place. “The only way to go forward is to look forward.” 

Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday said it more poetically: “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.”

It’s clear in Orange’s writing that he has some of this thinking in mind. At one point, Lony says:

“Everyone only thinks we’re from the past, but then we’re here, but they don’t know we’re still here, so then it’s like we’re in the future”.

Stories are sovereign, just as time is. I can’t tell you what happens to the characters in Wandering Stars because, yes, spoilers, but also because yes, stories do not end. But I can say that without the Native Hub of Oakland in which they might come together, physically or online, they stand less chance.

Theories of Time: Toruses and Loops

And so culture and history live wherever the indigenous mind works and creates, its location irrelevant. And the same might be said of time, of course, just as we discussed last week with Erdrich’s torus that turns about on itself. 

For Orange, we see much the same image, a looping circularity. The entire novel of Wandering Stars loops about and circles the original novel There There, with events before, on top of, and after the original powwow: prequel and sequel, meandering around and through generations of related characters.

And the echoes of this shape permeate the plot and imagery, as well. Bullets from Sand Creek resound in other eras, at one point physically riding in the flesh of our characters across years. Addiction, too, is a loop, and the struggle to get past it, out into a space of sober authenticity and identity, healing, is the real struggle. It’s survivance, moving from a narrative owned by the colonizer to one of self-authorship. Joy Harjo says it in her poem,  “I Give You Back”:

“I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear…now, I don’t know you as myself”

What I can say of Lony and Orvil both is that they refuse to be static symbols of our pity, they resist our efforts to put them into simple categories of stories which close neatly. 

Near the end of the novel, many of the characters return to visit Alcatraz Island, where some of them participated in the 19-month native occupation in 1969. In terms of a basement closet for suffering, you couldn’t get much more direct: indigenous land turned into a federal prison that held convicts from numerous tribes. But, significantly, there is no discussion of “walking away” here. They turn it into a drum circle. The scene ends with a Sunrise Ceremony there, not an ending.

If there is a lesson for Omelas, maybe it’s this. That it’s not about leaving the unjust community, pretending to subtract ourselves from community and history, but adding ourselves back to it. After all, we carry our culture and our historical accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More with us internally everywhere we go. Stop looking for Le Guin’s “unimaginable place” that simply does not exist, and start healing the places where we live.

Literature from Our Margins

I’ve argued that literature outside of Western spaces offers us opportunities to rethink, to reframe. Nigerian writers like Soyinka and Emezi blend myth, realism, and politics; writers like Orange and Erdrich bring together story, history, and personal reminiscence. All are Bakhtin’s polyphonic voices talking back to a Western CanonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More that desires its monolith. And if you’re a Joseph Campbell fan, I’ll add, “that desires its monomyth.” But these writers we’ve been talking about are a growing chorus that will neither be silenced or simplified.

And as we started today, I was worried about our simplified, binary thinking about our Suffering Child in Omelas. The Emperor’s mistake is always to read too simply, to misunderstand the story he hears. “Magnificent!” “Unique!” “What a design!” we say to his new clothes. 

Equally, our determination to blind ourselves to these global narratives, to read something else, probably something comfortably like ourselves, would love to objectify everything else as less important, powerless, stripped of land and tradition. But these are ideologies, that’s all. Those who have met injustice still retain ontological power. There are ghosts and ancestors with intention. They have linguistic power, turning the English language back against the treaties and legislation that sought to erase them. And they have narrative power, where authors like Tommy Orange write novels which build native hubs of community. 

As I urged with the Nigerian writers, so too those of indigenous America, north and central and south. The good news is that there are dozens and dozens of great choices. And one writer will lead you to three more. 

Go choose one. And read something.

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles.

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski.

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

 

Erdrich, Louise. The Night Watchman. New York: HarperCollins, 2020.

Harjo, Joy. “I Give You Back.” She Had Some Horses, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1983.

Momaday, N. Scott. “The Man Made of Words.” The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997.

Orange, Tommy. Wandering Stars. New York: Knopf, 2024.

Ortiz, Simon J. “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism.” Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature. Ed. John L. Purdy and James Ruppert. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. 120-25. 

Ramirez, Renya K. Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 

Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.