Location
Age
Area of FocusAbout Tommy's Work
Tommy Orange is a fiction writer capturing a diverse range of Native American experiences and lives in novels that traverse time, space, and narrative perspectives. Orange’s novels center his characters’ interior lives: their emotions, ideas, and realizations in moments of joy and pain. Through expansive casts of interconnected characters, he shows the many ways historical trauma and dislocation can rupture the fabric of everyday life.
Orange’s hometown of Oakland, California, serves as the backdrop for his depictions of urban Native Americans grappling with identity, survival, and healing. In his debut novel, There There (2018), Orange follows the lives of 12 Native characters as they make their way to the Big Oakland Powwow. Orvil Red Feather, dressed in borrowed and ill-fitting regalia, anticipates his first public traditional dance after secretly teaching himself by watching YouTube videos. Documentary filmmaker Dene collects stories of Native People in the Oakland area; Opal, a middle-aged Cheyenne woman, recollects her participation as a child in the Native occupation of Alcatraz Island. These and other characters complicate and challenge familiar stereotypes about what it means to be Native American. Their stories converge in a tragic climax—a robbery and shooting at the powwow. Orange’s second novel, Wandering Stars (2024), is both a prequel and sequel to There There. It imagines Orvil Red Feather’s ancestors and returns to the immediate aftermath of the violence that closes There There. Orange nimbly shifts between first-, second-, and third-person perspectives as he evokes the horrors Orvil’s ancestors underwent: the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 (in which the U.S. Army attacked an encampment of Arapaho and Cheyenne people) and decades of forced assimilation at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He traces the deep entanglement between the trauma Orvil’s ancestors experienced and Orvil’s own struggle with drug addiction. At the same time, Orange presents a story of resilience and survival, as members of the Red Feather family endure, despite 150 years of colonial violence.
In both of Orange’s novels, hope is subtle yet persistent. It is buried under the weight of history in his characters’ search for connection, meaning, and a way forward. Through sweeping storytelling married to an intimate focus on interiority, Orange illuminates the richness and depth of contemporary Native American life.
