Tommy Orange’s Oakland, California Indians 

Don’t call them “resilient.” The word implies a quick recovery from trauma or a crisis. Tommy Orange’s fictional Indians don’t make quick recoveries from the trauma of colonization, urbanization, gentrification and commercialization. And don’t call them “vanishing,” either. They and their ancestors haven’t vanished in the long long war that has been fought against them. Not if Tommy Orange has anything to say about the matter. Indeed, he wants nothing less than to change the narrative about the American Indian; to make it synonymous with the American story.

Orange’s first book, There There (2018, Random House)—a Pulitzer Prize finalist— ends with a predictable and an inevitable hail of bullets. It’s bang, bank, bang, a sound that echoes across the Coliseum in Oakland, California, where dozens of Indians have gathered for a powwow. Beginning in chapter one, and then all through the novel, the reader harbors the suspicion that something decisive will take place at the powwow, and indeed it does, right on schedule.

Doom and disaster stalk Orange’s Oakland and haunt his urban Indians. The shooters in the Coliseum are Indians and the wounded are also Indians; it’s a case of red on red violence with lots of blood, though the real killers aren’t Indians; they’re the same forces that have been making war on Indians for hundreds of years.

Orange’s second book, Wandering Stars (2024), doesn’t offer an ending as dramatic, as cinematic or as violent as the finale to There There. Instead of bang, bang, bang Wandering Stars ends with a  carefully worded letter written by Lony, one of the main Indian characters, who tells his family members: “May we learn to forgive ourselves, so that we lose the weight, so that we night fly, not as birds but as people, get above the weight and carry on, for the next generations, so that we might keep living, stop doing all this dying.”

Wandering Stars is a battle cry, a prayer, and an indictment. It places Indian addictions in the context of colonialism, assimilation, eradication and genocide.

 In that same letter to his family, Lony describes the “old whites who always thought they owned the earth…who’ve always led this country down its hole, to its inevitable collapse.” His words, which surely also express the author’s own sympathies, might resonate with others who aren’t Indians, though probably not with old whites who don’t see the inevitable collapse, but rather future glory.  Orange doesn’t aim to please everyone.

Politically speaking, Wandering Stars feels more advanced, than There There. It’s more hopeful and less nihilistic, though it’s fair to say that Orange writes well about violence and about the madness of crowds. In Wandering Stars he goes back into the historical past and writes about  Richard Henry Pratt, an officer in the US Army and a longtime superintendent at the Carlisle Industrial School. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” Pratt would say. Sounds like genocide to me.

Orange also writes about the massacre of Indians at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory in 1864. It’s also known as the Chivington Massacre; US troops were led by Colonel John Covington. His “body count” was near 600. Whatever the numbers, it was a slaughter.

Orange prefaces Wandering Stars with a quotation from our imperial president,Theodore Roosevelt: “The so called Chivington or Sand Creek Massacre, in spite of certain most objectionable details, was on the whole as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.” Orange rightfully resurrects it from the annals of history and reminds readers of a past that Indians have not forgotten.

“Native people were in recovery,” one of Orange’s characters says. “Getting fucked up seemed almost logical.” In his fictional world, in which “healing is holy,”  there’s always the alternative: the “bliss of oblivion.” No matter how low they sink, his Indians are always human and not “barbaric” or “uncivilized” as white men like Teddy Roosevelt might call them.

Even Orange’s most damaged characters, such as Tony Loneman, born with fetal alcohol syndrome and a drug dealer, redeem themselves. In There There many of the characters are artists, writers, oral historians and voracious readers. Dene Oxendene collects stories about Native people in Oakland. Edwin Black has an M.A. in comparative literature and Bill Davis, an ex-con and a Vietnam veteran, served a five-year sentence in San Quentin where he read Faulkner, Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Zeta Acosta and Ken Kesey, the same writers Orange has read.

I heard Orange speak this past summer at the Mechanics’ Institute and Library in San Francisco and I was impressed with his cool. “School kids learn about the Indians and the Pilgrims, but they don’t get an update,” Orange said. He added, “There’s a gap between what it feels like to be a Native and the way we are seen.” Born in Oakland, and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Orange grew up in an Evangelical Christian family, he explained, with an Indian father and a white mother; he read and studied the Bible and thought that the end of the world was imminent. After he abandoned the religion into which he was born, he worked in a bookstore and began to read novels, including The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and Confederacy of Duncesby John Kennedy Toole, who, he added, “both killed themselves.” Last summer, Orange was reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, and, though he described one section, which is about Natives, as “horrible,” he said he was “loving it.”

In Wandering Stars, Orange writes that “to sell anything you wanted to brand it and have a singular name belong to your product alone.” After just two published novels, Orange already has a name for himself, a product and a brand. If and when he writes another novel he will likely set it in Oakland, and populate it with young men without fathers who are often raised by women who aren’t their biological mothers.

In one of the late chapters in Wandering Stars, the narrator explains, “We come from prisoners of a long war that didn’t stop even when it stopped.” He adds, “surviving wasn’t enough. To ensure or pass through endurance text after endurance test only gave you endurance text passing ability. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.”

Orange’s Indians are survivors; they are also in recovery from the past and from their own worst addictive habits. Some of them are descendants of Jude Star, one of the stars of the novel, who survived the Sand Creek Massacre.

The post Tommy Orange’s Oakland, California Indians  appeared first on CounterPunch.org.