How do you rewrite the story of a people? This question shapes Tommy Orange’s sorrowful, beautiful debut novel. Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. There There is simultaneously the story of a small group of “Urban Indians” living in Oakland and the story of “Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNDs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians, First Nations Indians and Indians so Indian we either think about the fact of it every single day or we never think about it at all”. And to tell the story of his small cast of characters Orange gives his readers a sense of the great sweep of history that was initiated when a group of settlers showed up and took a continent from the people living there.

The book’s prologue begins not with a character but with the Indian Head. The image of a headdress-wearing head was used as the TV test card after the day’s programming had ended. It appeared on US TVs until the 1970s. The head had no name. It had no body. It had no tribe. It was just the Indian Head. Orange moves from this glowing TV head to the severed head of the chief of the Wampanoag, which was kept on a spike outside the Plymouth colony. The prelude goes on to describe how European settlers murdered Native American people. “They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we were intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies.”

Why all this history? Because Orange cannot rely on his readers to know it. Too many have been taught their history by saccharine Thanksgiving Day parades and cowboy movies in which Native Americans are acted by an “Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody”. When they appear, Orange’s characters look nothing like their Hollywood avatars. They live in Oakland, ride bikes and drive postal vans. As if anticipating a reader who expects a book about mythical figures who commune only with trees and grass, the prologue scoffs: “Buildings, freeways, cars – are these not of the earth?”

Various characters are heading to the Big Oakland Powwow, where there will be a dancing competition with a large cash prize. Each wishes for something different from the event. Orvil Red Feather aims to win, despite having a mediocre costume. Edwin Black wants to meet his real father. Blue works for the festival and the job is her chance to escape an abusive partner. Tony Loneman plans to steal the prize using a 3D printed gun, and the reader is conscious throughout of this threat of violence. Loneman’s gun brings to mind Chekhov’s rule that a gun in the first act of a play must surely go off by the end: the anticipation keeps the novel feeling tight and fast.

The brilliance of the book lies in what Orange does with this tension. With the plot device of the powwow holding the book together, he has the freedom to tell many different stories in many different voices. We learn about ripping the fur from a live badger in order to create a medicine chest. We learn too about the gentrification of Oakland, the excitement of buying a drone, about encountering the man who once raped you. We learn that many Native American names are colours because they didn’t have last names before the settlers came: names were made up or mistranslated or forced on them. The word Indian was imposed. The use of “Native American Indian” by his white mother causes Edwin Black to cringe. He doesn’t know his tribe but he’s learned that on Facebook the going term is “Native”.

The novel grants each character the gift of complexity. It is possible to love and to be selfish, to have a limp and to walk with a swagger. These people have been hurt by history but are capable of causing hurt too – either with a 3D printed gun or by slipping away from one’s family into the haze of drink.

The theme of addiction runs throughout. For several characters this is to alcohol, but drugs, Pepsi and even the computer also offer an escape. Orange refuses the common conflation of being Native American with being an addict. Instead he describes the sorrow that drives each character to their individual obsession. In the words of one, “Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong … We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it.”

The force that pushes against this wrongness is story. At times this comes in the form of AA confessions, at others it is the hope of writing a short story collection, or compiling video testimonials after the loss of a family member. The word “story” appears again and again, weaving through the different narratives. As Opal’s mother says, “You have to know that we should never not tell our stories.” The prologue describes how untold stories can become a wound, and how false stories hurt. Perhaps to tell your own story is an attempt to heal, at least a little.

But many of the characters are confused about how to tell their story. Knowing what you aren’t is not the same as knowing what you are. The characters aren’t certain what it means to be Native American. Some, like Dene Oxedene, are mixed race. Blue was adopted and brought up outside the community. Edwin Black was raised by his single white mother and doesn’t feel “Native enough”. Thomas Frank is half Native and half white, and thinks: “You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither.” For Thomas this split is manifest in his white legs and brown arms and he wonders “what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub”.

These characters are simultaneously Native American and teaching themselves to be Native American. Edwin Black takes Native American studies in college and goes hunting for his father. Thomas Frank immerses himself in the Indian drum circle. Blue feels white inside and so gets a job at the Indian Centre to find a way to belong. Orvil Red Feather conducts his own research. His grandmother is too busy to teach him, so “virtually everything Orvil learned about being Indian he learned virtually”. He watches hours and hours of powwow footage. He even goes to Urbandictionary.com to learn the word “Pretendian”. But his grandmother argues: “You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian.”

Eventually, Orvil puts this uncertainty into his powwow dance. In the changing room, surrounded by other men readying themselves for the dance, he realises all of them “needed to dress up to look Indian too”. Although he is still uncertain about his status, he decides that “to cry is to waste the feeling. He needs to dance with it. Crying is for when there’s nothing else to do.”

There There itself is a kind of dance. Even in its tragic details, it is lyrical and playful, shaking and shimmering with energy. The novel dips into the tiniest personal details and sweeps across history. Orange, like Orvil, creates beauty out of tragedy. Yet the novel remains a warning about the desolation that results when you separate parents from their children and try to eradicate a people.

• Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s Harmless Like You is published by Sceptre. There There is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £10.99 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com.

