Tommy Orange Visits Harvard Art Museums to Talk About New Novel, Indigenous Identity

Walking into Menschel Hall at the Harvard Art Museums last Thursday, listeners expect to hear a lecture from best-selling author Tommy Orange. Instead, Orange reveals excerpts from his upcoming book, “Wandering Stars,” set to be released in spring 2024.

In 2018, Orange published his debut novel “There There,” which tells stories about Native American characters and their relationships with their identities. The novel received great acclaim, including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and recognition as a Pulitzer Prize Finalist.

Before the lecture commences, Elizabeth Solomon, member and treasurer of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, acknowledges and honors the land. This “native space,” she says, not limited by legal boundaries, is where the Massachusett tribe “raised our children and honored and buried our dead.” She goes on: “We do not live in this place. We are of this place.”

Orange then takes the stage, wearing an all-black ensemble, other than his patterned flat-top baseball cap and gray Adidas hightops. He tells the audience he originally had planned to give a lecture on “There There” titled “The View From Here: POV, Its History and Uses in Fiction.” However, after talking to some Indigenous students on campus the night prior, he decided that an insight into his new novel “Wandering Stars” was a better idea. The audience is delighted.

Orange grips the podium with his left hand and phone with the other, reading the narratives of characters Vicky, Orvil Red Feather, and Lony Red Feather to a captivated audience. Afterwards, Mishuana Goeman, a member of the Tonawanda Band of Seneca and a professor of gender studies and American Indian studies, converse with Orange about “There There” and how “Wandering Stars” relates to it.

Orange says that his new novel will be both “a prequel and a sequel” to his first, following some of the same characters’ narratives as well as introducing new ones. Lony, for instance, is in “There There,” but speaks for himself for the first time in “Wandering Stars.”

During the interview, Goeman asks Orange about how he found his own voice. Orange explains that it was a “weird and winding path,” but authors such as Denis Johnson, Louis Erdrich, and Robert Walser helped him along the way. Erdrich’s novel “Love Medicine” served as the inspiration for Orange’s use of multiple perspectives in "There There.” Orange says his background as a musician also helped him develop his style, which emphasizes rhythms and cadence. He says he “thinks about the sound of sentences when revising.”

Orange’s career has also been defined by diverse cultural experiences, his own and otherwise. Having worked with native communities through a non-profit and engaging in digital storytelling of native narratives, Orange found he did not need to conduct much scholarly research for “There There.” Rather, he incorporated his and his community’s experiences.

However, Orange does have some regrets about which types of experiences he drew from.

“I feel a great shame for not doing more for Oakland native peoples,” Orange says. He explains that he did not want to “tell their stories” for them, but acknowledges that excluding Oakland’s native peoples entirely was a mistake. In “Wandering Stars,” Orange includes these Indigenous groups he neglected before.

Goeman contributes elements of critical analysis to the conversation. She notices that Orange’s works contain recurring detailed descriptions of characters’ bodies, which she connects to “fleshy” writing. She explains that “fleshy” writing comes from Black studies while describing colonized bodies, and suggests that when colonized people are forcibly separated from their geographic homes, the body is all that is left. Moreover, the body outwardly bears the marks of this violence.

Orange replies that this tendency was not intentional, though he does concede that the body can bear the marks of history, restating an old saying he was told as a child: if a Native American has freckles, some white person ‘got in there somewhere.’

Orange also contemplates the body in his books when his characters struggle with being “ambiguous non-white persons.” In particular, he points to the difficulty of exploring an Indigenous identity when the ways of authenticating Indigenous identity “are hurtful and harmful.” Goeman and Orange speak about how most Americans cannot trace their lineage more than two to three generations back. However, Americans often expect Native Americans to have a “pure” ancestral connection, even though the American government have contributed to erasing their culture for centuries.

Though Orange tackles weighty topics in his writing and in his talk, he’s also familiar with his audience. Orange responds just as easily to questions about archival research as he does to a question from an audience member on the correct terminology for the “Indian Taco” or the “Navajo Taco” (“Indian Taco, of course,” he answers). He jokes about the lewdness of teenage conversations in his book just as eloquently as he meditates on the personal, often identity-driven, quandaries of his characters.

As Orange put it in “There There,” “Novels are good at carrying their passengers from one destination to another, from one world to another, one person or community to another.”