What happened in the apple orchard that so frightened the children? Something had been half-glimpsed or heard, something in the night. Rumors sparked but didn’t catch. The children kept their distance, and stayed close to the nearby school. Years passed. The school was shut down. The buildings stood. The orchard grew wild. And, one day, a tourist out walking in the area discovered a piece of bone—a child’s rib.

In 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation began an investigation. Ground-penetrating radar detected what seemed to be evidence of some two hundred graves, presumably belonging to Native American children, in the land surrounding the Kamloops Indian Residential School, in British Columbia. A few weeks later, Cowessess First Nation reported signs of seven hundred and fifty-one graves around the Marieval Indian Residential School, in southern Saskatchewan. As the earth was probed, so were the wounds that were the legacy of residential schools, a cornerstone of colonial policy toward Native Americans across the continent for more than a century.

Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the United States and Canada with the aim of severing children’s spiritual and cultural ties and accelerating their assimilation. “Kill the Indian to save the man” was the guiding principle of the American Army captain Richard Pratt, who established the nation’s first such institution, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, at an old Army barracks in Pennsylvania. Children were forcibly removed from their communities, given new names, and made to convert to Christianity. (Many of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.) Native languages and spiritual practices were forbidden, and punishments could be brutal. St. Anne’s school, which operated until 1976, in Fort Albany First Nation, in Ontario, became notorious for shocking students in a homemade electric chair. Other schools used whips and cattle prods. Still others subjected the children to experiments, deliberately withholding food and medical care. In 2022, the U.S. Department of the Interior released an investigative report on the federal Indian boarding schools, which found “rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.” Illness and malnourishment were widespread. Thousands of children, perhaps tens of thousands, disappeared. At the Carlisle Indian School, which operated for four decades, more than two hundred children died, some barely surviving their first month. The last North American residential school closed in 1998.

“Wandering Stars,” the new novel by Tommy Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, spans more than a century of Indigenous history, and holds at its center the Carlisle school and its long aftershocks in the lives of a survivor and his descendants. The story follows Orange’s acclaimed 2018 début, “There There,” and is part of a rush of recent work examining residential schools, spurred by the discoveries in the orchard. These include the documentary “Sugarcane,” which just received a directing award at Sundance; the latest season of the FX television show “Reservation Dogs”; and the podcast “Stolen: Surviving St. Michael’s,” which won a Pulitzer Prize last year. They join a deep and varied body of literature on the residential schools: memoirs, poetry, plays, young-adult fiction. If such accounts sought to preserve the stories of survivors and shatter the silences within families and within society, these new projects prickle with a nervy energy about what it means to handle this material at all, to push one’s fingers into the wounds. Are there silences worth protecting? What kinds of care are possible for the living and for the dead? Can the stories be told without turning them into entertainment—easily consumed, easily forgotten? What sort of action does a story make possible; what sort of healing?

Connie Walker, a Cree journalist and host of the “Stolen” podcast, knew that generations of her family had attended the schools, but it was only after the news broke about the graves at the Kamloops school that the reticence of family and friends thawed and they would sit for interviews. And, as we hear on the podcast, there was a caveat. Over coffee, a schoolmate of her father’s warns her, “This stuff that I’ve shared with you, that’s our knowledge. That’s ours. What we’ve learned. And we use that in a respectful way. This is what I call ‘Nehiyaw.’ This is what we have learned. We don’t profiteer from it. We take care of it, where we have to pass it down. But use this in a good way. Don’t play with this.”

Second novels can be gawky creatures, sulky and strained as they try to slink out of the shadows of their predecessors. Will the second novel follow the formula, or repudiate it and chance something new? Critics seem to lie lazily in wait, ready to punish either choice. More of the same, a pity. A misjudged departure, alas.

“Wandering Stars,” calmly and cannily, has it both ways. Orange brings back the characters from the first book, where narration duties rotated among a cast of voluble and charming junkies, Internet and food addicts, criminals and aspiring criminals, deadbeat dads, dying mothers. “There’s been a lot of reservation literature written,” Orange said when his first novel came out. “I wanted to have my characters struggle in the way that I struggled, and the way that I see other Native people struggle, with identity and with authenticity.” His characters in “There There” are resolutely contemporary. They live in cities, mostly Oakland—“We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls”—and their connections to lineage and community are often frayed. Many feel insufficiently Indigenous. Thomas Frank, whose mother, like Orange’s, is white, reflects, “You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither.” To be Native American is less an identity to be claimed and proclaimed than to be tried on, furtively, after much Internet research.

In “There There,” Orange keeps his characters distinct and recognizable, but many of them share a particular gesture. Catch them unawares and you will find them looking in a mirror or just at the darkened screen of a computer. They like to hold their own gaze, if no one else’s. Many of them share the sentiments of another character, Tony Loneman: “Maybe I’m’a do something one day, and everybody’s gonna know about me. Maybe that’s when I’ll come to life. Maybe that’s when they’ll finally be able to look at me, because they’ll have to.” It’s the desire that fuels the novel, which works doggedly to maintain the reader’s attention with its pinwheeling narration; short, swift chapters; a gun produced toward the start of the book that goes off at the end; and that sickening undertow of dread. The reader can no more escape the book than one of its characters. “I wanted to create a fast-moving vehicle to drive somebody to some brutal truth,” Orange explained in an interview.

But it is a different tempo, a different ambition—almost a different writer—we encounter in “Wandering Stars.” Where “There There” shoots forward with a linear trajectory, the new novel maunders and meanders. Repetition is its organizing principle—the repetition of pain, addiction, injury. A linear story, it seems to argue, would be a lie. The narrative spirals around and envelops the previous book. “There There” ends with an attempted robbery leading to a shooting at a powwow, and one of the central characters, Orvil Red Feather, a high-school student, is shot and badly wounded. “Wandering Stars” casts back into the past, into the lineage of his family. The book begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, the Army’s mass slaughter and mutilation of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people in Colorado Territory. A teen-ager, Jude Star, narrowly survives and is imprisoned. His son, Charles, is sent to the Carlisle school. We do not see what he suffers; he shares only the ghost of a memory, of being grabbed by the back of his neck so hard that his legs give out and he falls to the bathroom floor. He discovers laudanum—it is like spooning sunshine into his mouth. When the action picks up in the present, in the wake of the shooting, we see his descendant Orvil recovering from his wound and falling into the same thrall, finding his way to opiates. Orange is as good as Denis Johnson in describing addiction’s passage into joyless duty. But it’s not merely addiction that connects these men, these generations—so many are drawn to ritual (newly invented or otherwise), storytelling, music-making. “The goal for me and my band-mates was always the same,” Orvil says. “To try and make musical loops that wouldn’t sound or feel like loops because of the way they were built, that’s the way out of a loop. Every day is a loop. Life tries the same as we try with music. Every day is the sun rising, and the sun going down, and the sleep we must sleep. I even like sleep and dreaming now. Every day is life convincing us it’s not a loop. Addiction is that way too.”

Loops are self-enclosing. The reader can see what the characters cannot—what forced migration and residential schools have prevented them from seeing and sharing. The reader can see how the addictions and terrors, as well as the capacity for pleasure and endurance, echo across the Red Feather family. The characters, cordoned off, capable only of confusing and disappointing one another, sometimes sense that profound sources of knowledge and connection have been severed. “Everything that happens to a tribe happens to everyone in the tribe,” Opal, the matriarch of the family, recalls her mother telling her. “But then she said now that we’re so spread out, lost to each other, it’s not the same, except that it’s the same in our families, everything that happens to you once you make a family, it happens to all of you, because of love, and so love was a kind of curse.”

With this expansive canvas to fill, Orange can seem perpetually out of time and out of breath. A few key characters are quick smudges, scarcely more than their signifiers—addict, nonbinary, grandmother—when, in his previous book, each character felt like a world. They sound alike, prone to parroting self-help homilies. Orange resorts to cliffhangers to stitch sections together. (“He’d never stopped worrying about Lony. Everything seemed fine. Until it wasn’t.”) And he works his motifs into tatters—holes, spiders, flying, and, above all, stars (even the bullet shards in Orvil’s body are star-shaped and prone to wandering). The book appears to suffer from the same condition as its characters; it cannot see itself, cannot see that it need not hammer home every theme every time, that it speeds where it should saunter, tarries where we need to move. And yet it expands and expands—why not throw in a subplot about a suburban pill mill?—with such exuberance that even at its most sprawling and diffuse, I wondered: Is this novel flailing or dancing?

Orange once spoke of his writing process as a practice of building portals for himself, small doors to help him find his way back into difficult sections in a draft. What if this billowy book is intended to open a series of small doors, but for the reader? It’s a shelf of books collapsed into one: for the price of a novel, here is a recovery manual; an account of trauma therapy; a guide to writing, with lists of recommended reading; a chronicle of American history that carries us from the Sand Creek Massacre to the Native American occupation of Alcatraz. Each topic is a door for the reader, and Orange insures that there will be something behind each door, something to keep. Everything the characters cannot share with one another is bound together here: the flailing and the dancing, the sorrow and the survival strategies, the sweet and the sour—like the blackberries one of their ancestors, Little Bird Woman, craves during her pregnancy. She talks, in a drowsy way, to her unborn child: “I like them tart, with that little bit of red still at their tops, or if they’re just a little hard and not so soft they come off when you pull at them and leave your fingers stained. The sweet and the sour together at once has been tasting better ever since you got big in me, so it must be you doing that.”

“Wandering Stars” talks to the future, too; it is a book about Orvil and his younger brother, Lony, and a story made for them. “Yes it would be nice if the rest of the country understood that not all of us have our culture or language intact directly because of what happened to our people,” their grandmother says. “How we were systematically wiped out from the outside in and then the inside out, and consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions, but we needed to understand it for ourselves. The extent we made it through.”

In July, 2021, shortly after the discoveries in the apple orchard, the T’exelcemc people of Williams Lake First Nation, in British Columbia, began conducting their own investigation into unmarked graves at St. Joseph’s Mission, a former residential school. The directors of “Sugarcane,” Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, followed the months-long process in their documentary.

It is a personal story for NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen’ of the Secwépemc Nation. His family had attended St. Joseph’s Mission, and his father had been found abandoned there as an infant. Like many of Orange’s characters, NoiseCat grew up in Oakland, and the story that emerges is one of loops of private pain intersecting, the repetitions revealed. “You don’t fully recognize the thing that we share. Your story is someone who is abandoned but also someone who abandoned,” NoiseCat tells his father. As in the world of “Wandering Stars,” the sweet and the sour mingle. Father and son are on a quest to get to the bottom of almost unbearable truths, but their travels often have the warmth and goofiness of a buddy comedy.

What is most striking, however, is what “Sugarcane” does not do and will not show. It is a particular refusal shared, in some ways, by “Wandering Stars,” “Reservation Dogs,” and “Stolen.” The most anguished conversations—between NoiseCat’s father and his father’s mother, say—are kept off camera. In the most recent season of “Reservation Dogs,” which depicts the residential schools, the torture and death of young children is alluded to but never shown.

There is a widespread expectation that beneath silence pulses a story waiting to be told. Suffering must be spoken, we are urged. Confession expiates. It has to be coaxed out, in its anguished detail, and held in the light. But in these works, where we anticipate testimony, we receive ceremony instead. The survivors in “Sugarcane” share the outlines of their experience, and the film cuts to scenes of men praying. After difficult revelations, the survivors are brushed with feathers. It’s the inversion of what such depictions teach us to expect. Instead of a story extracted, secrets revealed, a face in close-up, we see men going into the sweat lodge, where the camera cannot follow. We see the subjects being held, and covered, the traditional ritual for cohesion and healing restored.

The characters in “Wandering Stars” have a ravenous hunger for ritual—Lony Red Feather invents his own, out of a need and a despair he doesn’t fully understand, cutting himself and burying his blood in the earth. He is trying, he explains, to forge a connection to his tribal nation, the Cheyenne, the “cut people,” as they were once known. He is not shedding his pain but attempting to move with it, make something with it. In the opening montage of “Sugarcane,” we meet the survivors, and each of them is doing the same. NoiseCat’s father is carving wood; a former T’exelcemc chief, Rick Gilbert, plays his violin, lost, like Orvil, in loops of sound. “There was unspeakable pain and loss all about us wherever we went,” Jude Star recalls early in Orange’s novel. “But with the drum between us, and the singing, there was made something new. We pounded, and sang, and out came this brutal kind of beauty lifting everything up in song.” ♦