US Racism – Tommy Orange: How to Be Torn Apart

Tommy Orange is probably one of the media’s most well-known indigenous people in the USA at the moment. The 43-year-old writer, who comes from Portland, received the prestigious National Book Award for his debut novel “There, There” (2019), in which he tells about the everyday lives of especially young indigenous people in the USA. But he doesn’t want to be a spokesman for indigenous issues with media reach, as he explained almost a year ago in an interview with the television station CBS. As a member of the Cheyenne and Arahapo Nation, he did not want to and could not speak for all indigenous people in the USA.

His new book “Lost Stars”, which was nominated for the Booker Prize, tells the story of the lives of indigenous people in a very intimate, but also political and at the same time disturbing way, in a wide narrative arc that spans from the middle of the 19th century to today is enough. The focus is on the young Orvil Red Feather, a member of the Cheyenne Nation who lives in Oakland, California and also appeared in Orange’s debut novel. In this respect, “Lost Stars” is both a prequel and a sequel to “There, There,” but can also be read completely independently of it. Orvil is dependent on painkillers after surgery. He shares this fate of addiction with the majority of his ancestors over the last 150 years, whether male or female.

The book begins with the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, one of the worst events of the so-called Indian Wars, which began at the beginning of the 17th century and ended in 1924 with the brutal repression of rebellious Apaches by the US military. Orvil’s great-great-great-grandfather Jude Star survived in 1864 and was deported to Florida a short time later, where he was sent to the first re-education camp for indigenous people. It was founded by former army officer Richard Henry Pratt, whose motto was: “You have to kill the Indian to save the man.” This sentence became a much-quoted slogan at that time and makes it clear how brutal and systematic indigenous culture and Identity were fought in the USA at the end of the 19th century.

After his release as a supposedly assimilated American citizen, Jude Star becomes addicted to drugs. Like his children, he consumed peyote cactus, later generations then took laudanum, an opiate that was particularly widely consumed in the late 19th century. In the 20th century, alcohol and heroin are the drugs that family members become addicted to. In present-day Oakland, Orvil, the descendant of Jude Star, takes a lot of pills and staggers from one high to the next.

Again and again it’s about violence, racist exclusion and systematic repression. As a young man at the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Jude Star is regularly beaten and forced to convert to Christianity. His children are prevented from performing religious rituals, such as funerals. The fight for one’s own story and the repeatedly failing attempt to keep the family together are the central motifs of this saga.

However, no simple victim myth is staged. Tommy Orange changes the narrative perspectives in hard cuts, his characters speak out and formulate their hopes and fears. Families rarely stay together; they are usually violently torn apart. Children grow up in white families and usually live in a precarious status between adoptive child and domestic help. This multi-voiced family history meanders through the decades with many breaks and conflicts. People are lost as well as their culture and identity. In the 20th century it is difficult to even find out which indigenous “nation” someone belongs to and how much indigenous heritage there is in each and every one of them.

The young Orvil in today’s Oakland, whose story comprises almost half of the novel’s corpus, also struggles with this question. Orvil lives with his two brothers with his great-aunt Opal after their mother died of cancer. At some point, their grandmother Jacquie, a former heroin addict, comes to them and they try to live together as a family. This is characterized by numerous conflicts and escalates again and again. In the end, Orvil’s brother finds his own path and the family is torn apart again.

Tommy Orange tells this social drama in an impressively stylistic way with incredible tension. Unlike in the film sector, for example with “Funny Dance”, there are no other such insights into the lives and self-image of indigenous people in contemporary America in literary form.

Tommy Orange: Lost Stars. A. d.America v. Hannes Meyer. Hanser Berlin, 304 p., hardcover, €26.