Narrator: What if a government’s official policy was to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man"? This wasn't a hypothetical question; it was the chilling doctrine that shaped a century of American history. It was a declaration of cultural warfare, a campaign to systematically dismantle Native identity by forcibly removing children from their homes and immersing them in boarding schools designed to erase their language, their spirituality, and their connection to their people. This philosophy, born from the ashes of massacres and broken treaties, did not simply end when the schools closed. Its effects bled through time, creating a legacy of trauma that would echo for generations. Tommy Orange’s sweeping novel, Wandering Stars, is a profound and unflinching exploration of that legacy, tracing the intricate and often brutal journey of one family as they navigate the inheritance of these historical wounds.

Narrator: The novel establishes that before the boarding schools, there was a campaign of physical extermination. The narrative recounts the Sand Creek Massacre, where soldiers attacked a peaceful Cheyenne camp at dawn, and the strategic slaughter of thirty million buffalo, a policy summarized by the slogan, "Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone." When this overt warfare subsided, it was replaced by a more insidious strategy: cultural genocide.

The architect of this new war was Richard Henry Pratt, whose philosophy was to "immerse the Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked." His testing ground was Fort Marion, a prison-castle in Florida where Native prisoners of war were subjected to a brutal assimilation process. One of these prisoners is Jude Star. After surviving the Sand Creek Massacre, a trauma that steals his voice, Jude is captured and sent to Fort Marion. There, he and others are stripped of their traditional clothes, their hair is cut, and they are forced into military uniforms. They learn English by reading the Bible and are made to perform a commodified version of their "Indianness" for white tourists. It is here, in the depths of his displacement, that Jude finds a Bible verse describing "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever." Feeling a profound connection to this image of being lost and rootless, he adopts it as his new name, Jude Star, a testament to a self that has been systematically erased and painfully remade.

Narrator: The trauma of assimilation is not a burden carried by one generation alone; it is an inheritance. This is powerfully illustrated through the life of Jude Star's son, Charles. Sent to Pratt's infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Charles endures the same systemic abuse as his father, including beatings, starvation, and constant shaming for his "half-white" heritage. His memories become a "broken mirror," and he intentionally tries to forget the pain.

To cope, Charles turns to laudanum, an opioid that numbs his memories and makes him feel "less buried." His life becomes a desperate search for his disappeared father and a coherent sense of self, a journey fueled by addiction. He travels the country by train, works in orchards, and dreams of being a writer, but his addiction compromises everything. His self-loathing, particularly for the freckles he inherited from his white mother, deepens his sense of fragmentation. This cycle of pain and self-destruction culminates in a botched robbery, where Charles is shot and killed. His life exemplifies the devastating second-generation impact of historical trauma, where the wounds of the father manifest as addiction and a fractured identity in the son, preventing him from ever finding a "true place" to belong.

Narrator: Wandering Stars catapults this legacy into the 21st century, showing how historical pain continues to reverberate through the lives of Jude Star’s descendants in Oakland. The narrative focuses on three grandsons—Orvil, Loother, and Lony—each processing their inheritance in a modern context. Orvil Red Feather is shot at the Big Oakland Powwow, an event that should have been a celebration of culture. In the aftermath, he feels emotionally numb and turns to the internet, finding a strange sense of community by watching YouTube videos of other school shooting survivors.

This initial search for connection spirals into a deeper crisis. Orvil becomes addicted to "Blanx," a homemade drug concoction, and his life narrows to a cycle of getting high and making music. In one haunting scene, he attends an underground rave and, in a drug-fueled haze, finds his body moving involuntarily in a powwow dance. It’s a moment where his cultural memory physically breaks through the numbness of trauma and addiction. Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Lony, develops his own coping mechanism. Believing his blood has a special power, he begins a ritual of cutting himself and burying the blood, an act he connects to the Cheyenne being known as "the cut people." It is a desperate, heartbreaking attempt to find agency and a sense of spiritual power in a world that has left him feeling powerless.

Narrator: While the novel chronicles a lineage of pain, it is equally a story of profound resilience, anchored by the strength of its female characters. The narrative invokes a powerful Cheyenne belief: "A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground." This resilience is embodied by Opal Viola, Charles Star's pregnant partner. After discovering Charles's dead body, she flees into the wilderness, determined to give their child a future. She carries Charles’s writings and his body, planning to give him a traditional tree burial, all while speaking to her unborn child, passing down stories and a connection to the land. Her daughter, Victoria, is born in 1924, the year the Indian Wars were declared over. Her very survival is framed as a victory against a nation that sought her people's disappearance.

This unbreakable chain of matriarchal strength extends to the present day with Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, the great-aunt raising the three grandsons. She is the family's anchor, working a mail route to support them and navigating their complex emotional needs. She does all of this while secretly battling cancer, enduring debilitating chemotherapy in a state she calls the "Gray Area." Her quiet, immense sacrifice ensures the family's survival, proving that even when faced with overwhelming personal and historical burdens, the hearts of the women refuse to fall.

Narrator: The final part of the novel, "Futures," confronts the question of what comes after survival. It is not a simple or clean resolution but an exploration of the grueling, lifelong work of recovery. After a near-fatal overdose, Orvil is sent to a rehab facility ironically located next to a lakeside party spot. His recovery is not a single event but a four-year process. He finds a new, healthy way to "fly" through long-distance running and rediscovers music, learning to play the piano and compose sober for the first time.

Crucially, his healing journey forces him to confront his own ignorance. A friendship with a Miwok man in recovery, Virgil, prompts a shameful realization: Orvil is Native, yet he knows nothing of the Indigenous history of Oakland, the land he calls home. Virgil’s subsequent death from an overdose galvanizes Orvil to learn the names and histories of the Miwok and Ohlone people, an act of reclamation that intertwines his personal recovery with a broader cultural and historical consciousness. The future, the novel suggests, is not about erasing the past but about consciously engaging with it. It is a difficult path of running toward pain, not away from it, and finding a way to build a "secret temple" of understanding within oneself.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Wandering Stars is that historical trauma is not a relic of the past; it is a living, breathing inheritance that shapes the present in tangible and devastating ways. It manifests as addiction, as mental illness, as a fractured sense of self, and as a constant, low-grade war fought by individuals long after the official battles have ended. The novel masterfully shows that this pain is carried in blood, in memory, and in the very land we stand on.

The title itself, taken from a biblical verse that resonated with a displaced prisoner, becomes a powerful metaphor for this journey. These characters are "wandering stars," scattered across generations by the violence of history. Yet, their story is not solely one of darkness. It is also about the profound, resilient, and deeply human search for a way to navigate that darkness, to create new constellations of family and identity, and to finally find a way back home. The book leaves us with a challenging question: What are the unseen histories of the places we call home, and what is our responsibility to the stories buried just beneath our feet?