“There were children, and then there were the children of Indians, because the merciless savage inhabitants of these American lands did not make children but nits, and nits make lice, or so it was said by the man who meant to make a massacre feel like killing bugs at Sand Creek, when seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons, and then again four years later almost to the day the same way at the Washita River, where afterward, seven hundred Indian horses were rounded up and shot in the head.”
This is the opening paragraph of the novel, found in a prologue which sets the stage and context for the narrative to follow. Instantly, the reader knows that this will be a story about those nits and lice and just as immediately recognizes that to the author these are children rather than an inhuman pestilence. This opening paragraph also introduces two highly significant topographical features which will serve as setting for those incidents most essential to the narrative, Sand Creek and the Washita River. The integral aspect of that setting is strongly implied by the connection of a massacre at Sand Creek. The reference to the incident at Washita River likewise suggests the brutality of those conducting the massacre with revelation of the slaughter of horses. It is to be assumed, based on surrounding context, that slaughter is not borne of a particular evil intent toward animals but is conducted as a mean of controlling the men who ride them.
“The DNA test was a birthday present Tom got for the whole family…The result from his spits were emailed to him. The spit said he was white from Northern and Southern Europe, Native American from North America, and Black from the North African region. He’d already assumed he was part Black, because he knew what he looked like.”
The narrative is a multigenerational one that spans a timeline from the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 to Oakland in 2018. This quote reveals how far the book’s period setting moves over the course of the story. The DNA test mentioned in this quote returns the results of Sean, an adopted boy. The multi-ethnic and multi-racial genetic composition stands in stark contrast to the historical subjugation of entire cultures due to the desire to maintain a rigid and starkly divided line racial purity. The progression of the narrative from the massacre of Native Americans by white settlers becomes an integral aspect of the thematic connection. Such a wide expanse of a chronology in a book about American history is inevitably going to touch on matters related to the “melting pot” ideological boast which, as much of the darker chronicles within the story reveals, often more a piece of propaganda cultivating America’s unique place in history rather than a testament to majority desires and governmental policy.
“At the massacre, while it was happening, the bullets and the screaming, bodies down everywhere, Spotted Hawk shoved a boy at me like: Take him too. I was a young man then, barely not a boy myself. The boy my grandmother pushed at me had freckles spattered around his eyes that looked like blood. If someone had freckles, it usually meant that white people had become intimately involves in the lives of one our people, made a mess.”
The key element to observe about this quote is the shift in point-of-view from the first two quotes above. The book is separated into three sections and as this example demonstrates, Part One is more focused on individual stories in a snapshot form. This is achieved by allowing characters to tell their own stories in their own manner of speaking. The reference to being at the massacre clearly delineates the setting of this particular example as being at the early section of the chronology. Nevertheless, this quote does resonate with sections to come later. The seemingly offhand reference to freckles, for instance, will recur throughout the narrative, acting as a kind of shorthand for racial mixing. Star’s observation that freckles are signs of such genetic intrusion will later show up in the form of racial self-hatred when a character is noted for hating his face directly as a result of the appearance of freckled pigmentation. The connection between the narrator and his grandmother foreshadows the significance of familial legacy and interconnectedness via marriage. This may already be assumed as just a few pages before this quote there is a family tree charting the ancestry of Jude and Hannah Star on one side and characters named Bird Woman and Victor Bear Shield on the other.
