For We Are the Children of the Stars

Abstract

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 incorpoL 111 rating 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