Assimilation and Cultural Erasure: Surviving the School in Wandering Stars

The Thematic Claim

In Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange argues that assimilation is not a neutral process of integration but a deliberate campaign of cultural erasure designed to dismantle Native identity from the outside in and the inside out. The novel shows that this erasure operates through institutions—the Carlisle Indian School, allotment policies, citizenship laws—but also through the gradual loss of language, ceremony, and family cohesion. Yet Orange complicates this picture by depicting how characters resist, preserve, and reinvent their traditions even when the tools of that resistance are themselves products of colonization. The central claim is that surviving assimilation means carrying a doubled inheritance: the trauma of forced change and the stubborn endurance of Indigenous ways.

Tracing Assimilation Across the Plot

The Prologue: Blueprint for Erasure

The prologue establishes the historical foundation. Richard Henry Pratt’s experiment at Fort Marion—where seventy-one Indian prisoners were given uniforms, ledger books, and military drills—becomes the blueprint for Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Children were forcibly taken, given new names, had their hair cut, and were punished for speaking Native languages. As our summary of the prologue notes, the slogan “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” reveals the goal: total replacement of Indigenous identity with a docile, laboring American one. The prologue also shows how even the act of drawing in ledger books—which became a form of cultural expression for artists like Howling Wolf—was originally a tool of surveillance and commodification. Visitors bought the drawings as curios, treating living culture as a vanishing spectacle.

Charles Star: The Broken Mirror of Memory

Charles Star’s chapter, “Over There,” dramatizes the internal damage of boarding school. He remembers the haircuts, beatings, starvation, and shame—but also suspects a deeper, forgotten horror. His memory is a “broken mirror,” and he has hidden things from himself on purpose. Two attempts to run away from Carlisle end in failure: the first time he hides in an apple orchard and watches the school from a distance; the second time a wolf drives him back. This wolf, which he later believes stalks him in dreams, represents the fear and self-surveillance that assimilation plants inside a child. Charles eventually leaves the school “the way one left a war,” but his life becomes a wandering search for identity—part Indian, part white, never fully at home. The train journey that opens his narrative, with its images of piled buffalo bones and a dark tunnel, literalizes the passage into an iron world where children are hardened or crushed.

Opal Viola: The Gray Area of Generational Survival

In chapter twenty-five, “Gray Area,” Opal Viola Bear Shield undergoes chemotherapy and reads the story of her ancestors, including Jude Star. She confronts a painful truth: her family did not pass down language or ceremonies intact because of the systematic disruption of boarding schools and forced relocation. “Surviving wasn’t enough,” she thinks. The gray area between living and dying becomes a metaphor for the cultural middle ground where many contemporary Native people exist—neither fully erased nor fully restored. Opal’s realization that “the culture sings” and “the culture dances” leads her to question why she sheltered her grandsons from their heritage. Her mother, who participated in the occupation of Alcatraz, and her great-grandfather who survived Sand Creek, passed down something more than trauma: a resilient desire to belong.

Character and Symbol Connections

The characters of Jude Star and Charles Star embody the split between public and private identity. Jude, whose name he chose from the Bible, adopts “Star” as a last name after feeling “uprooted” and “twice dead.” His ledger art—drawings that use the bird’s-eye view developed by Howling Wolf—becomes a way to tell stories from a perspective above the violence. The ledger art symbol thus represents both the prison of colonial documentation and the possibility of Indigenous authorship.

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Orvil Red Feather continue this tension in the present day. Opal’s bald head from chemotherapy echoes the forced haircuts at Carlisle, but she chooses to wear her grandsons’ baseball caps—a small act of reclaiming visibility. The bullet fragment that appears in the novel’s imagery (from the Sand Creek and Washita massacres) is a physical reminder that erasure began with genocidal violence and continues in subtler forms.

The symbol of the drum and the color blue (associated with the water tower on Alcatraz) link together moments of ceremony and protest. The drum’s heartbeat is the opposite of the military bugle; blue recalls the “wandering stars” of the epigraph from Jude. These symbols are not static—they shift meaning as characters use them to navigate between worlds.

Complexity and Contradiction

Orange does not present assimilation as a simple binary of victim and resistor. Some characters internalize the doctrines of Carlisle. Charles Star sometimes believes he is “following himself” as if predetermined, and his addiction to laudanum (morphine tincture) numbs the pain of memory. The narrator of the later rehab chapter (chapter thirty-three) admits to “ignorance of the land’s original people” and only begins healing after learning California tribal history. Even the act of covertly sampling Native music in a band shows how reclamation can feel illicit or incomplete.

The prologue itself questions the language of identity: “Indian children never stopped being Indian children,” but the names they call themselves change over generations. The novel acknowledges that some families lost language and ceremonial knowledge, and that “simply lasting was great for a wall, but not for a person,” as Opal reflects. This nuance prevents the book from offering easy redemption. Instead, it suggests that cultural survival is messy and ongoing, not a return to a pre-contact past but a creative adaptation—like Howling Wolf’s bird’s-eye view, which emerged from the trauma of a train ride in chains.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the prologue establish the connection between the Sand Creek Massacre, Fort Marion, and Carlisle Indian School?
   The prologue uses the same rhetoric (“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”) and shows the same figures—Richard Henry Pratt and Howling Wolf—moving from prison to school. The ledger art created at Fort Marion becomes a prototype for how Indian children were allowed to express themselves only within approved colonial formats, while parents who resisted were imprisoned on Alcatraz.

2. In what ways does Charles Star’s memory function as a form of resistance and self-protection?
   Charles deliberately forgets the worst aspects of Carlisle to survive. His fractured memory (“broken mirror”) hides a deeper trauma, but this forgetting is also a way to keep the school from completely defining him. Yet his wandering and eventual attempts at ceremony suggest that remembering—even partially—is necessary for healing.

3. How does Opal’s chemotherapy experience parallel the forced assimilation of earlier generations?
   The chemotherapy is described as “deletion” and “grayness,” mirroring the erasure of cultural identity. Opal’s baldness recalls the haircuts at Carlisle. However, where the school stripped children of their names and clothes, Opal actively seeks connection—reading her ancestor’s story, acknowledging the loss, and deciding to “come back better made.”

4. What role does ledger art play in both assimilation and resistance?
   Pratt gave prisoners ledger books to “document” their lives, turning them into curios for white audiences. But artists like Howling Wolf and later Jude Star transformed this tool: they drew from a bird’s-eye view, preserving ceremony and landscape. Ledger art thus becomes a vehicle for Indigenous storytelling, using the master’s paper to assert a different vision.

5. Why does the novel end with a letter from Lony described as “dead letter mail”?
   Lony’s letter, written with no return address, symbolizes the diasporic condition of Native peoples: he feels like mail that never reaches its destination. Yet the act of writing shows that even severed connections can be repaired. The letter is a small but powerful act of reclaiming family and home, despite the systems that tried to erase that bond.