Wandering Stars: A Novel

Content Warning: This study guide refers to instances of genocide, forced assimilation, and racially motivated violence, as well as suicide and suicidal ideations, self-harm, and graphic depictions of substance use disorder and sexual assault.

This section elaborates on the text’s history of the institution of boarding schools to force assimilation of Indigenous populations and describes in detail a lived experience of the Sand Creek Massacre. Almost 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho were killed by US volunteer soldiers led by Colonel John M. Chivington on November 29th, 1864. Most of the dead were women, children, and the elderly. The massacre occurred along the banks of Big Sandy Creek in Southeastern Colorado—land that the Cheyenne and Arapaho people believed was protected by the US Army. Though the Treaty of Fort Laramie was supposed to protect this land for the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, this treaty never delivered. When a family was murdered and publicly displayed in Denver, Colorado, many people baselessly blamed the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. Colonel Chivington gathered 675 US soldiers to attack the people camped along the banks of Big Sandy Creek, resulting in the Sand Creek Massacre, from which Jude Star escapes in the novel.

Jude Star is taken to Fort Marion, where he encounters Christianity and begins reading the Bible. As Orange narrates in the Prologue, Pratt uses the model from Fort Marion to construct the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which Charles attends. According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, almost 86% of school-aged children were attending boarding schools by 1926. There, after being forcibly removed from their families, these children were subject to extreme instances of violence and abuse, sometimes as a result of practicing their rituals or speaking their languages. There were over 500 such schools in the US, and many of the children in these facilities have yet to be documented, or their experiences rectified, by the US government. Though thousands of Indigenous children were kept in the schools, the exact number of children who experienced the horrors of boarding schools in the 1900s is still unknown.

As Orange points out in the Prologue, much of this history is misrepresented, ignored, undocumented, or erased, prompting Orange’s exploration of fractured identities through his characters.