53 pages • 1-hour read
Wandering Stars: A Novel
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Themes
The Impact of History, Generational Trauma, and Violence on Identity
Wandering Stars explores how its history impacts the identities of its characters in the present so that, instead of cohesive narratives about who they are, their sense of self is fractured, representing an interpretation of the contemporary Indigenous diasporic experience across the US. The first instance of such a fracture occurs early in the novel, when Jude remembers staying on Anastasia Island while imprisoned at Fort Marion in Florida. There, many of the imprisoned Indigenous people practiced cultural song and dance and enjoyed what felt like freedom. Such practices invited intrigue from many of the white people who considered Indigenous people a spectacle, and Jude talks about performing for them. He reflects,
We performed ourselves, made it look authentic for the sake of performing authenticity. Like being was for sale, and we'd sold ours […] It didn't matter what I did, white people wouldn't know the difference. Eventually I didn't either, it seemed none of us did (17).
Jude witnesses the dissolution of meaning in real time, revealing the way colonization and imprisonment decimate culture. Jude himself feels estrangement from what he’d known, as white people turn an entire history and culture of people into a performance. This sentiment also appears when Pratt thinks about the parade held by Roosevelt to demonstrate the way the US had “civilized” Indigenous people.
History, including familial history, shapes the identity of the characters in Wandering Stars through pain and disease but also resilience—even if this resilience sometimes feels hopeless for characters like Opal and Orvil. When Orvil realizes he's developing a substance use disorder, he thinks:
Past family members and the ancestors were constantly sending their blessings and curses down through time from that beyond before, that gave his present its particular bent, it's dumbness, it's light, it's scream, and its song, but also it's sometimes dead silence (123).
Orvil realizes that he is predisposed not only to substance use disorder but also to the history that preceded him, its blessings and its curses, its pain and glory, and even its “dead silence,” or the history he cannot know because of its erasure or removal. The effect this has on Orvil’s identity and his future, for him, disconnects him from his own life. He believes that “[h]aving a future meant you had hope. It definitely didn't feel like the future was mine anymore. It felt like it belonged to what happened to me” (169). Orvil feels that his life belongs to the events that have happened to him and his future is not in his own hands.
Opal echoes this sentiment, too. Her experience is potentially representative of many Indigenous Americans who’ve endured centuries of violence, erasure, oppression, and a fractured sense of self as a result. She describes the difference between being grateful for ancestors and knowing them as they truly are. She thinks, “I always felt […] our family line was in some way weak. And yes weakened by the effects of history, colonization, and historical trauma. But also not strong enough to pass down the traditions or language successfully” (247). Opal acknowledges the impact colonization and trauma have had on her family line but wonders whether the fact that something is missing contributes to this weakness. She continues to reflect:
It would be nice if the rest of the country understood that not all of us have our culture or language intact directly because of what happened to our people, how we were systematically wiped out from the outside in and then the inside out, and consistently dehumanized and misrepresented in the media and in educational institutions, but we needed to understand it for ourselves. The extent we made it through (247-48).
Opal’s monologue reveals the disconnect that can occur in identity because of centuries of generational, systemic, and interpersonal violence and trauma. Jude, Opal, and Orvil all describe the weight of history, generational trauma, and violence on their own fractured identities and the desire to find a way to make sense of centuries of suffering, resilience, and family history. Motifs like dreams and hunger support feelings like desire and longing and, in many ways, might speak to the contemporary Indigenous American diasporic experience and its impact on families, futures, and individual identity.
Art and Its Transformative Power
Art, in multiple forms, operates in Wandering Stars as a tool for the characters to find a way into themselves and their stories—potentially circumventing the fractured sense of self and family that trauma, violence, and cultural estrangement create. Wandering Stars argues that writing, music, dancing, and singing (or, in a word, culture) can become another kind of “language” that allows characters to find an understanding of their identities and create a cohesive narrative.
In each time period throughout the novel, the characters or narrators demonstrate that stories can remake a person into someone better than they were before. First, Jude tells Charles a story about his father, thinking that “stories […] take you away and bring you back better made” (35). This belief echoes throughout the rest of the novel, each character coming to this realization through the pages Charles leaves and which Opal takes or through their own experiences as descendants of the Stars. Victoria then archives these pages for Opal and Jacquie because she knows they will need them. She thinks that in understanding who they are, they will understand that it has to include who it is that made them [...] not that they be thanked or acknowledged because they are inherently sacred but because their stories are what you are made of (107).
Victoria, therefore, understands that stories are critical to a cohesive understanding of self, not because they demand reverence but because they create and inform the lives of individuals, families, and cultures.
Opal, for example, reads the pages when she finally opens the box that’s been waiting for her at the Friendship Center and realizes that “[i]t was more than survival. The culture sings. The culture dances. The culture keeps telling stories that bring you into them, take you away from your life and bring you back better made” (248). Opal realizes that culture, through practices like writing dancing, or singing, contains within it transformational power that can not only heal but entirely remake those it touches, understanding that in order to do more than just survive, culture is tantamount. Orvil realizes this, too, representing the final moment when the idea that stories and art can be transformative. When he gets clean and makes music more often, he realizes that in doing so, “something was mending in me. something was mending me” (298). Though Orvil experiences this something transcendental when he plays music while under the influence, it’s only when he’s clean that he notices its power to heal or “mend” him.
Wandering Stars uses multiple forms of art throughout the narrative to reveal its transformative power as a means by which the characters (and cultures) explored in the novel can not only survive, but transcend, the weight of trauma, history, and violence.
Land, Place, and Belonging
Wandering Stars explores how an ambiguous sense of belonging and place can be both destructive and creative as its characters grapple with their identities and begin to learn how they can create their own places and stories. Factors like mass genocide, the violent removal of Indigenous people from their land by settlers, and the continued systemic erasure of Indigenous cultural tradition and history contribute to a sense of loss and ambiguity. Characters with multiracial heritage figure heavily in Wandering Stars, too, as people who seek to find their place and where they belong in their communities.
The forced and violent removal of people from their land reverberates through history and creates a feeling of detachment for characters in the present. As Jude Star lives on after the Sand Creek Massacre and under the oppression of the United States Government, he notes that he’d work to make the best of the land the government distributed after stealing it. He thinks about the land as “an Indian country to end that bigger Indian country too looted and taken over by then to ever go back to anything even resembling what it’d once been” (24). Jude recognizes the immense loss of not only land, but life as it was before the settlers invaded America, even while he works hard to cultivate something new. He does, and begins his own family, but this feeling of both loss and creation carries down to his son.
Charles, near the end of his life, thinks about his own story and where he belongs, struggling to understand his purpose. He thinks, “Everything had become so muddy, so filthy feeling, his own skin, spattered with mud from the mess they made, his parents by mixing their blood and making him” (69). Charles struggles with his heritage, feeling that his multiracial identity is a “mess.” Sean struggles with the same problem. When he learns he has Indigenous heritage, the narrator says that “he couldn't pretend to now be Indigenous American, not white either, but he would continue to be considered black, holding the knowledge of his Indigenous American heritage out in front of him like an empty bowl” (140). Sean’s multiracial identity creates for him the feeling he doesn’t belong anywhere, and that he can’t fully claim any single history—much like Charles felt, even while Charles feels a sense of hope that he can make his own home with Opal.
When Victoria reads the letter Charles wrote to Opal, however, she too struggles with a sense of belonging, trying to find her place after so recently learning her own history. She reads in the letter that Charles writes, stating, “we don’t belong to the earth, but that we are the earth” (106). Victoria doesn’t understand what it means, but she keeps the letters—but, much later, Orvil has this same understanding. He says, “I tried to think of humans as not belonging to the earth but of the earth” (302). As Orvil works to find his own sense of place, he comes to the same conclusion that his ancestor did about belonging—that maybe belonging is already intrinsic to who he is rather than something to which he belongs. As each character continues to feel, in some ways, separate from their histories and unsure where it is they might find a home—a place to belong—they realize, too, that such emptiness might also be fruitful ground for creation. Lony’s realization that home is where his family is concludes the novel, showing that belonging is something that can be created even when so much of what it means to “belong” has been destroyed or created by oppression and whiteness.
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