Wandering Stars: A Novel

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.