Little Star

Little Star is a powerful and haunting work of historical fiction that illuminates one of the darkest and least told chapters in American history.

Between 1819 and 1969, the U.S. government systematically removed hundreds of thousands of Native American children from their families, sending them to Indian boarding schools under the guise of education. What awaited these children was not opportunity-but trauma. Stripped of their language, culture, and names, even children as young as four were subjected to brutal assimilation tactics: physical and emotional abuse, rampant disease, forced labor, and heartbreaking isolation. Of the 408 known federal boarding schools, New Mexico held 43-its quiet desert landscapes forever scarred by the cries of stolen children.

Little Star follows the life of Tarak, a six-year-old Mescalero Apache boy lovingly nicknamed "Little Star" by his grandfather, who is torn from his home and thrust into one of New Mexico's infamous schools. What begins as a story of innocence lost becomes a decades-long journey of survival, identity, and the search for healing. As Tarak grows into a man, shaped and wounded by a system designed to erase him, he must confront not only the ghosts of his past-but the sacred roots that refuse to let him go.

Will Tarak reclaim the culture they tried to destroy? Can he find his way back to the land, language, and love that were stolen from him?

This is not just one boy's story-it is the story of a people's resilience, memory, and fight to survive.