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Chapter 8
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
On Pratt’s second day in San Francisco, he goes to look for Charles Star. Pratt finds him on the floor of the shack in the orchard, dead in a pool of blood. Pratt then sees what looks like a page with his (Pratt’s) name on it at Charles’s typewriter and also sees a bag of cash open by Charles’s body. Pratt thinks he has to leave immediately and turns around to go out the door. Later, Pratt sits in a military hospital in San Francisco. When his son visits, Pratt repeats, “No better plan,” and he wishes he could have said that to Charles. There was no better plan for the U.S., Pratt thinks, and no better plan to deliver Native people “from themselves to themselves.” Pratt dies not long after and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His gravestone says, “Erected in loving memory by his students.”
In the military hospital, as Pratt seems to slip into senility, he also seems to grasp for a justification for what he has done throughout his life by saying, “No better plan.” Through that statement, Pratt seems to argue that the kind of forcible assimilation he advocated for and practiced was the best possible plan for Native people. Notably, Pratt, a white man, seems to have arrived at that conclusion without consulting Native people, highlighting how much of the horror carried out by the U.S. was done by white supremacist institutions that systematically excluded the very people it oppressed and abused—all while claiming to help them.
Active
Themes
