Wandering Stars: A Novel

This section explores the three major themes of The Impact of History, Generational Trauma, and Violence on Identity; Art and Its Transformative Power; and Land, Place, and Belonging through the Red Feather family, during and after their visit to Alcatraz. When the Red Feather family goes to Alcatraz, Lony’s attempt to fly reveals the lengths to which he will go to save his family, as well as capturing the depths of his loneliness. When he asks Orvil if this is what it takes to get him to see how he is doing, this suggests that Lony—who spends all his time worrying about Orvil—doesn’t feel anyone is worrying about him, despite being the youngest and known to self-harm as part of his rituals. His exchange with Jacquie also reveals how little he feels understood. Lony tells Jacquie that he believes that “[k]ids know something you actively try to make us lose” (262). Lony implies that as he grows up, the people around him attempt to shut down his imagination, and therefore his opportunities and even freedoms. He also tells Orvil that “[w]e all need to see something bigger than what we think is possible to make us believe” (269). Lony believes in the power of imagination but feels alone in this belief. He knows that for his family to heal, they must be willing to create beyond what they think is possible. Lony continues to embody traditions of their seemingly forgotten Cheyenne culture: He is the family member who is eager to return to rituals, to the earth, and to their collective healing. While his family dealt with personal issues as the result of generational trauma, Lony felt their collective pain as both a gift and a burden.

Orvil, after his overdose and upon getting clean, realizes the need to heal generational trauma, starting with himself. Through the creation of music, and with the help of running, Orvil begins to write his own story over again, highlighting the theme of Art and Its Transformative Power. He begins to find peace within himself, even though he knows his journey is far from over, and comes to a different understanding of his own heritage, and that of the people who surround him. When Orvil reads the names of all the tribes across California, he thinks, “[it] changed something in me I knew I would have to keep trying to figure out how to do something about” (301). This “speaking in another language,” as he describes it (301), brings him toward a new understanding of himself and his world, one which requires him to practice exploration and discovery. Orvil realizes the importance of land acknowledgments and being responsible for a history the US has so long tried to erase. As Orvil comes back to himself and is slowly released from substance use disorder, his desire to heal comes to the forefront, and he shows a deep reverence for not only Cheyenne culture, but the history of all Indigenous Americans, even weaving their sounds into the music he makes. Loother, who comes to Orvil’s performances with his baby, Opal, remains a steady force for healing, and in naming his daughter Opal, the text suggests that generational trauma is slowly being replaced with the chance of generational healing.

Lony’s letter to his family, and the final chapter of the novel, describe the burden he has had to carry as the youngest member of his family and the person with the most sight into the past and, therefore, the strongest desire for collective healing. His comparison of the Indigenous American diaspora to dead letter mail, or mail with nowhere to go—belonging to no one—also captures the comparison of the narrative’s characters to “wandering stars,” or pieces of the universe wandering in different directions. Lony learns, however, as do many of the characters in the novel, that family and belonging can come to have different meanings depending on what they create, even while they hold their distance, longing, and separation. He writes:

We the young ones have always suffered, inherited, had to know what it means to be left behind and left with shit and left with weight and left without you or any form of help or help with policy to bridge what's between the abyss and anything even resembling justice and equality (314).

Lony could be the voice for a generation of Indigenous youth left behind to carry the weight of generations of trauma and violence, something Lony feels for most of his life throughout the novel, with little help to make sense of it from his family. This suggests that, though the burden is felt by all, the legacy falls the heaviest on the youngest, who is perhaps the most able to initiate collective healing because they witness the older family members in various stages of grief over generational trauma. This passage can also be connected to the prologue, in which Orange writes that “Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry” (viii). Lony becomes a voice for these children, acknowledging the weight under which he suffers, finally making a temporary severance from his family necessary. Further, when Lony closes the letter with the hope that his family is still there, he underscores the fact that Indigenous Americans die at higher rates than other Americans, and his family appeared very close to losing someone, too.

Lony also becomes a voice of hope and promise toward a possible future of generational healing. He writes, “May we learn to forgive ourselves, so that we lose the weight, so that we might fly, not as birds but as people, get above the weight and carry on, for the next generations, so that we might keep living, stop doing all this dying” (314). In Lony’s wish to come home, he hopes that, together, his family can learn to overcome the weight of their history and, in doing so, become a hopeful vision for future generations—the first descendant being Loother’s daughter, Opal. Wandering Stars ends, then, not necessarily optimistically, but with a vision for the future in which community and creation can move the Red Feather family beyond the pain they’ve suffered and into a better future.