Wandering Stars is a 2024 novel by Tommy Orange, nominated for the Booker Prize.

This is a book by an author of Native American descent about the destruction of Native American culture by European settlers. We see this process taking place over successive generations from the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, up to the 2020s.

The first and perhaps most interesting thing about Wandering Stars is that it’s a novel, self-consciously so, using many kinds of novel writing techniques – frequent changes of viewpoint, switches between third, first and even second person narration. The native tribes of north America did not have novels. Reading and writing were something Europeans brought with them. Reading is part of the regime of assimilation we see at work in a facility in Florida, something which massacre survivor Jude Star comes to love, amongst all the things he hates about what is imposed upon him. So a book about the destruction of native culture is itself a cultural form involved in its loss.

For me the interest of the novel comes out of this basic irony. The book certainly makes clear the tragedy of a people having their culture destroyed. But from that starting point, we get a very nuanced look at what culture and identity might mean. Confined to the Florida correctional facility, Jude Star is forced to read the Bible. He notes that the creation myth described in Genesis is similar to tribal myths, suggesting archetypes common to all people. The things that define us actually turn out to define other people too. For a book about loss of identity, Wandering Stars is surprisingly revealing about how indefinable that lost identity was. Native American society had no uniformity. Many hundreds of tribes each had their own languages, customs and varying ways of life. Cultural identity, apparently such an important thing to people, starts to evaporate once you try to pin it down. The people in the book who are really hardline about cultural identity are white supremacists – hardly a good advert for taking such a fundamentalist stance.

Reading Wandering Stars can be hard work, given all the point of view switches. You are not a passenger in this novel, carried along by an immersive reading experience. Maybe that’s useful given the context. Readers don’t just submissively receive. They have to be part of the effort perhaps? I thought the required effort was well worthwhile.