I wear the morning star (Pt. three of the Ghost horse cycle) - Hardcover

Jamake Highwater

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060223553 ISBN 13: 9780060223557

Publisher: Harper & row, 1986

Synopsis

Sitko, growing up in a hostile white world that tries to make him renounce his heritage as an American Indian, finds refuge in the pictures he paints.

About this title

From School Library Journal:

Grade 8 Up A fascinating blending of realism with mystical elements, told in poetic prose. Sitko, the believable and sympathetic narrator, is the grandson of Amana, the Northern Plains Indian heroine of Highwater's Legend Days (1984) and The Ceremony of Innocence (1985, both Harper). Like his grandmother, he is brave, rebellious and tenacious in holding onto his native American cultural heritage and resisting racial prejudice. Sitko relates the story of his childhood and youth in Southern California during the late '40s and '50s, beginning with his placement in an orphanage where he was physically and psychologically abused. He is later reunited with his mother and grandmother at the home of a movie actor with whom Sitko's mother is living. Throughout these years of growing up, Sitko's father, Jamie Ghost Horse, appears periodically. He returns one final time to kill his estranged wife and injure her lover. By novel's end the lover, Sitko's brother and Amana have died, and nothing remains but a cascade of fantastic images that pour from the fingers of Sitko Ghost Horse as he keeps alive the past in the vivid colors and images of his paintings. I Wear the Morning Star is as original and powerful as the first two in the series. All have the same unique melding of Amer-Indian mysticism with realism and incorporate themes dealing with interpersonal relationships among family members as well as people with differing racial and cultural backgrounds. Sitko and the other characers are well-limned protagonists whose believable exploits enable readers to better understand another culture and its people. David A. Lindsey, Lakewood Junior/Senior High School Library, Wash.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

The third book of Highwater's Ghost Horse Cycle, this wrenching novel is told by Sitko, grandson of Amana, the heroic Indian woman introduced in Legend Days. It begins when Sitko's mother abandons him at a public home called Star of Good Hope, where he is ostracized and beaten, and ends with his beloved grandmother's death, when he, a young man, is making paintings of her memories. Sitko's brother Reno tells him, "Nobody's got to be an Indian if he doesn't want to be," but Sitko can never be anything else. The pictures and stories he creates arise from "the dark place" in his heart that is fiercely Indian. Alone or in the company of the other Ghost Horse books, this is a deeply imagined work that is likely to last. Relentlessly tragic, Sitko's narrative pours forth with the vivid power of a dream.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper & row
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0060223553
• ISBN 13: 9780060223557
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 148