Wandering Stars: A Novel

Jude Star is the ancestor of the Bear Shield and Red Feather families. Jude Star, whose original name is not Jude Star, is a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre. Jude recalls that his life before Sand Creek feels like someone else’s, and after Sand Creek, Jude does not speak for a long time. He does, however, begin to read and see similarities between Christianity and his own spirituality. Jude becomes a voracious reader and believes in the power of stories—something he passes down through generations.

Jude also develops a substance use disorder. He marries an Irish-Catholic immigrant named Hannah, with whom he has a child named Charles, bringing Jude happiness. However, after being promoted to police chief, he is faced with a decision to arrest and condemn Bear Shield for a peyote ritual. Jude instead flees, abandoning his family but saving everyone he loves in the process. Jude is the tragic hero of Part 1 of Wandering Stars.

Victor Bear Shield is Opal Viola Bear Shield’s father. Victor takes Jude Star with him to an encampment of Cheyenne people after the Sand Creek Massacre. He teaches Jude how to create a drum and sings songs along with its beat, connecting Jude to something he’d felt he’d lost, while the two travel to different encampments, witnessing the widespread suffering across the western US before they’re imprisoned by Pratt.

Victor also teaches Jude about peyote and holds ceremonies for people in their community. Victor remains a predecessor of rituals and culture for Jude.

Charles Star is Jude and Hannah’s son, who marries Opal Viola Bear Shield, uniting the families. Charles, abandoned by both his parents, struggles to find his place in the world and within his own family. Charles, traumatized from the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse he experienced at Carlisle, develops a substance use disorder. He is also a writer, but his substance use disorder hinders his writing.

Charles, trapped by his own rage, trauma, and pain, plans to escape with Opal and travel north, but he dies before he leaves. Just before his death, Charles writes the pages that are passed down through his family line. Before he dies, he feels both the weight of his present and past and hope for his future with Opal.

Richard Henry Pratt is a character in Wandering Stars and a real historical figure. Jude describes Pratt as a “brooding jailer,” since Jude meets him while imprisoned at Fort Marion. Pratt is a military officer who oversees the prisoners of Fort Marion, promising to turn Indigenous people into Christian soldiers for the US. Pratt goes on to found the Carlisle Indian School, modeled after his experience at Fort Marion.

Pratt, who dies of tuberculosis, convinces himself that everything he’s done for Indigenous people he did to help them, though he turns away from the part of himself that knows he did it for power and control, trying to contain something he could not understand. Pratt is interned in Arlington Cemetery, remembered for all the “good” he did for Indigenous people.

Opal Viola Bear Shield is Victor Bear Shield’s daughter and Victoria Bear Shield’s mother. Opal was also forced to attend the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. She made her own way out of the boarding school, working her way to Oakland. She is strong and longs to connect with her heritage, but tells her unborn daughter, Victoria, that she doesn’t have much to give her besides distant memories. She is optimistic about her future with her daughter, surviving in the wilderness, but dies in childbirth.

Victoria Bear Shield is the daughter of Charles Star and Opal Viola Bear Shield. She is raised by the Havens, white people for whom Opal was a servant, and is therefore estranged from her history until late in her life. Victoria brings her daughters, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather, to Alcatraz Island, where she tells them she is dying. She leaves Charles’s writing at the Friendship Center in Oakland for her daughters to find.

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is the daughter of Victoria Bear Shield, Jacquie Red Feather’s sister, and Orvil, Loother, and Lony’s great aunt, though she raises them as their grandmother when their mother dies of an overdose. She, at first, keeps the boys from their Indigenous heritage. She does this to protect them, though she realizes at the Big Oakland Powwow that this might not be the best way to do that. Opal struggles with her own connections to her heritage. Her mother, Victoria, only had the information she could research and the box of her father’s things. This happens to Opal, too, particularly since her mother died so young.

Opal will do anything for Orvil, Loother, and Lony, but she often struggles with the guilt of not feeling that she’s done enough, particularly in connecting them to their Indigenous culture and history. She is wise, often picking up on what’s going on with her family even while they think they may be deceiving her. She is optimistic but loses hope after she’s diagnosed with cancer. Charles’s pages make Opal realize she comes from a long line of survivors, and their culture—and their stories—are critical to her family’s survival. She decides then to stop sheltering the boys from their own histories and culture.

Jacquie Red Feather is the daughter of Victoria Bear Shield and Orvil, Loother, and Lony’s grandmother. Her daughter is Jamie Red Feather. Jacquie, who has struggled for years with substance use disorder, has stayed away from her family. Now that she’s sober, she moves in with her sister, Opal, and gets closer to her grandchildren

Jacquie feels selfish for having to focus first on her recovery but tries hard to get to know her grandchildren and take care of them. She, like Opal, felt estranged from their mother, and her rape at Alcatraz when she was a teen coincides with the beginning of her substance use disorder. Jacquie feels insecure about how her family might feel about her, all the while working hard to stay sober.

Lony is the youngest of Jamie’s three sons. Lony is imaginative, spending much of his time in fantastical worlds and trying to cultivate superpowers while also trying to learn about the rituals of the Cheyenne people, with little information to go by. As Lony grows up, he realizes he wants to live outside, away from his family. He does so, traveling from place to place and living a transient life. Lony represents the youngest generation (apart from Loother’s daughter, Opal) to bear the weight of their family history. He is wise because of this, witnessing everyone before him handle trauma in their own ways.

Even though Lony practices independence, he longs for connection and healing in the end, but also throughout the narrative. He learns that trying to hold (and solve) his family’s problems on his own—as he has seen his family do—isn’t how communities, and people, heal. He pleads with his family, in the end, to heal alongside him, as it’s a gift to learn how to survive together.

Loother is Jamie’s middle child, in between Orvil and Lony. Loother, like his brothers, struggles to find his place in the world and in his family. Loother is angry about the world and what happened to his brother, and Loother feels that this is not anger but instead directness. He does not fit in with kids his age and is very shy. Loother is creative, writing both poetry and rap, but he struggles with his desire to write and perform rap music, wondering whether it’s cultural appropriation.

Sean Price is Orvil's friend who shares a substance use disorder. Sean is adopted and of multiracial heritage, something which becomes very hard for Sean to make sense of as a teenager. Sean does not feel like he fits anywhere, and though he was close with his mother, her death leaves him with his father and brother whom he is nothing like. Sean is also non-binary, something which Sean does not share with anyone in the narrative. Sean regrets that Orvil is no longer a part of Sean’s life and feels lonely.