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Chapter 3
Themes
and Colors
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
Jude bakes bread in the kitchen and talks to his son Charles about his life before Charles was born. Bear Shield’s daughter Opal then knocks on the door and tells Jude that her mother is sick. They’re planning to have a ceremony, she says, at the same place where Jude attended the ceremony before. Before Jude sets off, he makes sure his gun is loaded. When he arrives, he sees two agents approaching the tent. Jude charges them and knocks them down before they can draw their guns. It’s the only way, he thinks, to make sure Bear Shield and his family aren’t sent to prison. Jude then ties up the agents and puts them on his horse. He knows that if he makes these men disappear, he will have to disappear himself, and he rides away into another life.
Up to this point, as a police officer, Jude has accepted the mandate to break up peyote ceremonies, but he can’t bring himself to betray Bear Shield. Jude decides to put himself in harm’s way to ensure that nothing bad happens to Bear Shield. That the passage opens with Jude talking to Charles and closes with Jude disappearing “into another life,” draws attention to the fact that, once Jude disappears, Charles will grow up without a father.
Active
Themes
