Wandering Stars Themes

Wandering Stars follows a Native American family through several generations, beginning in 1864 and ending in the present day. The novel opens with a depiction of the Sand Creek Massacre, a massacre carried out by the U.S. Army (an institution of the U.S. government) against Cheyenne and Arapaho people in which the Army murdered hundreds of people, many of them women and children. That massacre is an example of the institutional campaign of genocidal violence…

Wandering Stars opens with Jude Star running from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. The book then traces the aftermath of the brutality and violence of that massacre across generations of a single Native American family, beginning in 1864 and continuing into the novel’s present day, set in 2018. As Jude says, he feels like his life before the massacre happened to a different person, signaling the rupture in his life caused by the trauma…

While undergoing chemotherapy, Opal Viola says that survival isn’t enough; instead, if she survives chemo, Opal hopes that she will come back better than before. She says that Native culture has embodied a similar kind of resilient transformation. Despite systematic efforts to exterminate Native people and Native culture, Opal thinks that the culture not only survives but “sings. The culture dances.” Opal’s affirmation of life in the face of suffering, exploitation, and oppression points to…

In 1864, Jude Star’s Native identity was part of his everyday life; by 2018, though, Jude’s descendants Lony, Orvil, and Loother struggle to feel connected to their Native identities. The novel depicts the various forms that cultural erasure took place in the generations that separate Jude from Lony, Orvil, and Loother, including massacres and murder, imprisonment, the forced assimilation of residential schools, and through Victoria’s upbringing by white people who withheld the truth…