For We Are the Children of the Stars

I wrote a novella, "Children of the Stars," as a satire on federal Indian policies in the twentieth century, with a little nineteenth-century history thrown in for background. The work was written in a science fiction framework. I selected one chapter to be included in a reader for an introductory American Indian studies course, which was assigned to four large classes over two academic-year semesters.

The events of this chapter take place on the fictional Blue Hill Reservation, which is occupied by an unnamed tribe of a northern Plains cultural tradition. Many of the young men have enlisted in the military forces because of poverty, high unemployment, and not enough education to qualify for much else. It is the only way open to continue the warrior tradition of their ancestors and to receive the honors and respect of the people who are important to them.

A "black budget" project, the term for a very secret federal organization, called the Top Planning Group (T.P.G.) of the Daedalian Engineering Project (D.E.P.), taps into this warrior tradition for its own purposes. The T.P.G. is in most ways like a cybernetic spider incorporating useful things into the web of the D.E.P. They function as the controllers of the D.E.P., as a cybernetic system continuously adjusting to new information to maintain its own stability. A pre-Viking space probe has discovered a planet on the other side of the Sun that is almost a twin planet of Earth. The differences have not been definitively established by the project's scientists. The D.E.P. mission is to solve the "Post-Columbian Residual Population Problem" by sending all American Indians to this planet so all the reservation land on Earth can be terminated from federal trusteeship and transferred to the Jason Corporation. Jason's mission is to manage for profit the land and the natural resources thus acquired. One obstacle to the project is the lack of information about the newly discovered planet. An exploration team is needed to go to the twin planet. The best source for exploration team members is American Indians with a warrior tradition. The teams are trained in small units of highly specialized supersoldiers known as Exploration (E.) Teams, drawing on the Plains cultural tradition of the Dog Soldiers and other soldier societies. This is similar to the practices used to recruit Indians for high-risk military units for Vietnam and for the nineteenth-century Indian wars.

Because the planet is so Earth-like, the T.P.G. decide that there is an excellent possibility that there may be a human or human-like population there, perhaps similar to Neanderthals. Therefore, the E. Teams are trained to respond to aggressive actions from Neanderthal groups.

In the beginning, the recruits were not told about the task they are to carry out on another planet. But when a Blue Hill mystic, Raven, learns the truth about the existence and purpose of the E. Teams through a vision, Dr. Stella O'Ryan, the director of training for the E. Teams, decided to tell them.

To the E. Team members, the announcement meant that they, the Children of the Stars, would be returning to their home in the stars. The D.E.P. thus became the instrument of another cultural reality, the return of the Star Children to their original home. A revitalization movement crystallizes around this possibility of returning to the stars.

"Children of the Stars" has many elements of the world at the edge of the twenty-first century: there are megacorporations with multi-interlocking subsidiaries and linked government agencies; there are organizations such as the D.E.P. that are reaching out to Mars for potential colonization.

The elements of a story about a space travel program, controlled by a megacorporation intent on gaining great wealth and power...