My Review of "Wondering Starts" by Tommy Orange on Goodreads

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is both a sequel and prequel to Tommy Orange's last novel before this one "There, there"

Just like "there, there" the story is not always in chronological order and it's narrated by different characters. At first it's hard to know how each character is connected to one another or the story. I was a little lost at times because of that. This book throws bits and pieces of history and insights about the lives of Native Americans in small chunks. I learned about the Sandy Creek Massacre and was a little disturbed to learn that the same unit that killed women and children in Colorado in the 19th Century was there in Iraq fighting with us in Ramadi, the good ol'd 3rd Calvary Division "brave rifles" from Fort Carlson Colorado. It made me think about how we all grew up idolizing and playing cowboys and Indians.

I could not help to think about my ancestors in Venezuela, like most people from Latin America we are a mixture of European and Native America blood ( as well as African) I personally am 1/3 Native and 2/3 European. Yet I know nothing about my Native heritage. I grew up thinking that my people are the sons and daughters of Spain. All traces of what was there before the Spanish colonized us is gone, totally erased, like it happened in the past and whatever happened has nothing to do with the present. Tommy Orange says nah, screw that, the past is not gone, we're still here, we are often ignored but this is our land and our people still live.

I did not feel good reading all this, it was not entertainment, it was not a happy read, it was something that calls for reflection and meditation. My thing is, so we read this, then what, what can we do? Learn from our history so it doesn't repeat? I wish. Maybe I'm jaded, but we Americans are pretty damn good at ignoring the parts of our history that don't feel good, that blemishes the idealized myths of the birth of our nations. We built our country on stolen land stained with the blood of their first occupants then we write the history to make it look like we were heroes.

Maybe there's another less depressing way to bring this up? like, I enjoyed reading "The Only Good Indians" by Stephen Graham Jones. You can get a lot of knowledge that way, this book doesn't sugar coat anything. If that's how you like it, please do read it.

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