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Chapter 26
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Wandering Stars, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonization, Racism, and Institutional Violence
Intergenerational Trauma
Addiction
Survival vs. Resilience
Identity and Cultural Erasure
Summary
Analysis
In the morning, the family piles into Opal Viola’s Ford Bronco, even Orvil, who came home the night before. Opal Viola and Jacquie haven’t been to Alcatraz since the 1970s when they went with their mother during the occupation. (Native people lived on the island in protest for close to two years.) On the ferry to the island, Jacquie tells Lony that she once climbed the water tower there, though she’s not one of the people who wrote the graffiti on it. Lony asks Jacquie why Native people dress up as birds, and Jacquie says not everything has to make sense. On Alcatraz, they sit in lawn chairs together, set some distance away from the main circle where people pray, read poems, and talk into the microphone. Lony drifts away from their group. Opal stands behind Orvil and rests her hands on his shoulders, which moves Loother to tears.
When Opal Viola rests her hands on Orvil’s shoulders, Loother starts to cry. That surge in emotion shows how much Loother has been impacted by Orvil’s absence and by the apparent dissolution of their family, as they each continue to struggle individually with their own issues instead of, as Loother seems to want, banding together as a family to help each other with what they are each going through. Notably, that occurs while they’re on Alcatraz commemorating the Native occupation of the island, which was a protest that marked people of various Native cultures coming together to fight a common struggle as a collective.
Themes
Orvil climbs up the water tower. He moves slowly to try and avoid startling Lony, who is at the top of the tower, standing on the railing with his arms outstretched. A crowd watches from below. Lony tells Orvil to stop coming up and says that he (Lony) just wanted to see if he could fly. “We’ve just been the feather,” Lony says. “We used to be the whole bird.” Orvil says that if Lony comes down, they can take a trip and fly anywhere they want to go together. Lony asks Orvil why he’s up there, and Orvil says he’s up there because Lony is up there. Lony asks if that’s all it took for Orvil to check on how he (Lony) has been doing.
