Victim statements, a presentation of the impact of a crime during a judicial proceeding, became common here late in the 20th century, although other cultures have had similar and earlier versions. One of the more flamboyant examples in art occurs in the latter stages of the trial in Rashomon, the great Kurosawa film about the murder of a traveler and the rape of his wife.
Unable to determine whether the truth lies with the accused or the wife, the court enlists a medium to question the spirit of the dead man. Unsurprisingly, the ghost's version of a victim statement is also biased, yet this is fair enough, given that the other two have presented their own self-serving narratives.
I began thinking about victim statements while reading Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars. It has some of the same characters as his highly praised There There, but ranges back in time to the later stages of the Indian Wars and the remote ancestors of characters like Lony and Orvid Red Feather.
The novel begins with the ghastly massacre at Sand Creek, November 1864, when members of the Third Colorado Cavalry under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapahoe village, killing and mutilating anywhere from a couple of hundred to as many as 600 people, mostly women and children.
The attack was so egregious that several of Chivington's officers had refused to participate, and one testified later at a Congressional hearing highly critical of the Colonel. None of this, however, changed the situation on the Plains. Treaties continued to be made and broken, the buffalo, and even native ponies, continued to be slaughtered, and Cheyenne and Arapahoe land continued to shrink.
Were the plains tribes then doomed to utter extinction by government policy? Not quite. There was an alternative that two of the Wandering Stars Sand Creek survivors wind up experiencing. Taken into US military custody and imprisoned in an old fort in Florida, they undergo the regimen of English language education, military drill, and Christianization that would later be the pattern for the now notorious Indian Schools.
Their new non-Native names are Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield. They are the male progenitors of the subsequent characters, and as Orange is neither an historian nor a lawyer, their victim statement is in the form of a novel, made up of their stories and the testimony of their descendants, male and female, right down to the twenty-teens.
Orange is an excellent writer, and many of the short narratives are gripping, particularly the historic accounts that will be new to many readers. What is striking is that it is not the brutal events (and Star and Bear Shield see and experience a lot) that cause their families the worst damage but rather the cultural losses. Besides the near extermination of the buffalo, the key animal in the whole plains ecology and in the Cheyenne economy, these included the loss of ancestral languages, religion, art, diet, even clothing and hairstyles.
The re-education program that intended to "kill the Indian, save the man" was in some ways more devastating that any battle, because it took away identity and substituted something coerced, something the descendants know is not authentic. Characters like Opal Viola Bear Shield and Orvil and Jacquie Red Feather know that they are missing something vital, and without even the residue of the old ways that sustain Jude Star and Victor Bear Shield, they fill up the void with alcohol and drugs.
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| Tommy Orange |
The later sections of the novel deal with their struggles with addiction, and more interestingly, how they begin to piece together the remnants of the old culture and adapt what in contemporary society can be useful and meaningful. This is not an easy task. For some, while even the identity of their original tribe is lost, they still remain "other" in the society. Yet they persist. Wandering Stars serves not just as a literary victim statement, but as a testament to survival.
