The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

There's more than one way to be a good Indian.

For contemporary readers, the title of this novel may feel a bit cringeworthy. Teddy Roosevelt probably coined the phrase, "The only good Indians are the dead Indians." It expressed the attitude many white settlers held that Native Americans were vicious and immoral, and that ultimately the only way to deal with them was to either kill them off or completely assimilate them. The author reflects on how this sentiment still affects the lives of tribal people. The men in the book avoid terms such as "Native American" or "Indigenous Peoples," preferring instead to call themselves "Indians," the name they grew up with. This is a horror novel that also attempts to reclaim the idea of the "Indian's curse," turning it back on tribal people themselves. 

Review

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is about four Blackfeet men -- Ricky, Lewis, Gabriel, and Cassidy -- who commit a crime in their youth, which brings a curse down on them for which payment comes due a decade later. In a short preface, we see Ricky leave a crowded roadside bar in North Dakota to relieve himself somewhere in the back of the parking lot. While he's doing that, a young elk clambers up onto a truck, doing damage and setting off alarms. The elk begins to dash wildly around the parking lot, damaging more trucks and setting off more alarms, and then charging head-down toward Ricky. He grabs an oversized wrench from a truck bed, planning to use it to protect himself, but the elk disappears. As angry men coming running toward their trucks, Ricky realizes he looks like the culprit who has done all the damage. He turns and runs across the frozen prairie, hoping to escape the mob, only to find his way blocked by a herd of elk. Ricky is beaten to death.

In part one of the book, we meet another member of the group, with the unlikely name Lewis Clarke, who is, like Ricky, also living off the reservation. Lewis lives with his white girlfriend, Peta. He works at the post office, where he has been assigned to train a new employee, Shaney, a Crow, the only other Indian who works there. Lewis recognizes that the other employees have naturally grouped the two of them together in their minds.

At home, Lewis has begun to have disconcerting visions of a dead elk in his living room. That vision morphs into another -- an elk-headed woman -- which begins to haunt him. Lewis eventually tells Shaney the story of the event that has troubled him all these years. As young men, the four friends had been hunting elk on the reservation without any luck. On the last day of the hunting season, as a snow storm was rising, the four of them ventured into land that was reserved for the elders to hunt, and ended up killing a number of elk by firing blindly into the herd. As Lewis took on the elk he had chosen as his to clean, he realized it was a young, pregnant doe that was merely crippled, not dead. It had to be shot again. He buried the unborn calf. The four men were caught in the midst of the crime by the game warden, Denny Pease, who forced them to leave the meat behind, pay a fine, and never hunt on the reservation again.

Peta is annoyed to learn that Lewis chose to share this story with Shaney but not with her. Subsequent events that I won't go into lead Lewis to become more and more paranoid, thinking that either Peta or Shaney is really what he has come to think of as the Elk Head Woman, a vengeful spirit that is out to destroy him. Eventually he murders both of the women horribly, violently, bloodily. There's no way that he could get away with it, even if he were thinking rationally. He flees, only to be hunted down and killed, not too differently from Ricky, by a vigilante mob. The reader has, up to this point, been unsure whether Lewis was really haunted by a vengeful spirit, or whether he was suffering some sort of mental breakdown. This is a bit of a spoiler, but there's no way to avoid it: at the beginning of section two, the point of view switches to that of the Elk Head Woman.

Two men from that fateful day -- Gabe and Cass -- are still close and still living on the Blackfeet reservation. The avenging spirit of the young elk turns her attention to them and to everyone around them. Gabe and Cass have decided to build a lodge and hold a sweat to honor the memory of their two dead friends. A local cop named Victor has asked Gabe and Cass let his son Nathan join them in the sweat, hoping the experience will purify Nate of some of his bad behavior. In return, Victor will manage the hot stones which have to be brought into the lodge periodically. When Elk Head Woman arrives at the lodge, she launches into a purge of her own.

Earlier in this section, we met Gabe's daughter Denorah. While Gabe is separated from his wife and not living with the two of them, he is deeply proud of his daughter, calling her his "Finals Girl" because it is she who will take her team to the basketball finals and ultimately the championship. Denorah comes to Cassidy's place the evening of the sweat lodge ceremony to pick up some money her father had promised her, but she arrives on the scene as Elk Head Woman is wreaking her bloody vengeance.

 
The third section of the book concerns Elk Head Woman's pursuit of Denorah through the wilderness to finish her vengeance. And, yes, this is where I laughed when I finally realized the author's pun in calling Denorah the Finals Girl all along.

I'll leave the summary there. If you're interested, you can find out for yourself how the final confrontation ends. Though some people seem to find Jones' prose difficult to parse, I think he writes beautifully; and the narrative becomes clearer as the tale progresses. Besides the horror story itself, the book provides interesting insights into contemporary Native American experiences. All of that said, I thought the precipitating event for the curse was a bit thin and unconvincing, so knock a point off for that.