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.