So when I first set up this blog, I created three main categories to go in the sidebar: Film Reviews, Theory, and Books. And somehow one of these has gotten pretty well populated and the other two remain rather sparsely so. I guess the thing is that everything takes time. If I write about a film, I probably watch it once to enjoy it and then a second time to take notes and consider it before sitting down to write. Depending on the length of the film, that’s about 4-6 hours of pre-writing prep. But if it takes me a couple of weeks (or sometimes longer) to finish a book, it’s daunting to go back to the beginning and start all over again. Anyway, I just finished reading something. I really liked it. I hope you don’t mind that these are first impressions.
The Only Good Indians (2020) by Stephen Graham Jones
Assuming that, like myself, many readers here may see more horror films than read horror books, I’m going to try to be a bit more careful here about spoilers. So the story largely follows four Blackfeet men who in their youth carried out a bad piece of hunting, going after a herd of elk in an area reserved for elders of the tribe and killing them en masse in a bad way, slaughtering more than they could ever actually use, cruelly and disrespectfully (It’s hard to imagine truly respectful killing, but this is the opposite).
Over the next ten years, they all find themselves haunted by the ghost of that day, both in an emotional/psychological manner and in a really quite literal sense. Something has come back, something that longs to hunt them down and pick them off one by one, after ensuring that they each taste something of the terror and tragedy they had wrought so glibly as young men.
Yes, they are being haunted by an elk.
It doesn’t sound that scary, but the story is often unsettling and there are some turns that are absolutely brutal. This avenging presence takes its time and really works its way under their skin.
A large portion of the book is given over to following one of the four, Lewis, who has moved off the reservation, married a white woman, and gotten a job at the post office. He has obviously taken steps to leave his past behind him, but it lingers. He is torn by ambivalence regarding his heritage, his past actions, and the people he’s walked away from.
Roughly ten years after the carnage of the inciting incident, which resulted in the four friends being banned from hunting on tribal lands and Lewis and one other deciding it was time to leave the reservation, he flashes back to that day and from then on, starts feeling like he is being watched, toyed with, that he can’t trust the people in his life. I don’t think it is too much of a spoiler (I already said they were being haunted) to say that he’s right, but the way it plays out, it is easy to doubt. He really goes round the bend, descending into a self-destructive and violent paranoia. I mean, he is basically right about everything, but he is also, by the end of the first part of the book, quite mad, dangerously and tragically so.
Really – some of this gets pretty rough.
It is at this point that the worm turns and what had been merely a vengeful presence, a memory, a sadness becomes embodied—taking physical form and implacably seeking her revenge. Here the book also takes a stylistic departure, shifting between a third person narration of the actions of Lewis, Ricky, Cassidy, and Gabriel and a second person, speaking directly to the elk-woman or Po’noka:
“What you do after you’ve made your hard way back into the world is stand on the side of the last road home, wrapped in a blanket torn from a wrecked truck, your cold feet not hard hooves anymore, your hands branching out into fingers you can feel creaking, they’re growing so fast now. The family of four that picks you up is tense and silent, neither the father nor the mother nor the son saying anything with their mouths, only their eyes, the infant just sleeping.”
It is a striking turn and initially took some getting used to, but it has an interesting effect throughout the rest of the novel as, from one line to the next, the narrative may shift, situating the reader in the position of the killer, the aggrieved party seeking retribution, while still readily identifying with these four guys, all well drawn, each deeply flawed, but trying to do better—utterly human, and hence unforgivable, two legged, rifle carrying threats from the perspective of the elk.
I don’t want detail the events of the plot because there is effective suspense here, and the book is worth reading, but thematically it is interesting and rich. It may even be somewhat muddied, but maybe that’s good. This exploration of guilt, native identity, nature, responsibility, respect and disrespect, historical violence, revenge, inconsolable pain that can’t be forgotten, a past like a millstone round the neck, and the question of a future freed from that weight is all the more rewarding for the fact that it is messy like life and not clear like a political tract.
We have endless cycles of harm having been done – to the environment, to a people, to animals, and to individual humans who repent their misdeeds, who love the people in their lives and whose loss will, in turn, harm others. And there is a sadness that lingers, a guilt. Life on the reservation feels bleak, a dead end road for those who stay, but life off the reservation feels like abandonment, like erasure. Everyone has done wrong in one way or another and it is not clear if forgiveness is ever possible—of oneself or of others.
And that is life, right? We take things for our own need and others are harmed and we move on. Every minute of the day. But the book asks us to pause and dwell in that space for a moment, to consider repercussions, to have a moment of recognition for the horror another has experienced.
There’s a moving passage late in the book wherein the daughter of one of the four comes across the site of the initial hunt and comprehends it in a very personal way:
“But, that story being true, it also means—it means her dad really and truly did this, doesn’t it? Instead of being the one down in the encampment, bullets raining down all around, punching through the hide walls of the lodges like she knows happened to the Blackfeet, to Indians all over, her dad was the one slinging bullets, probably laughing from the craziness of it all, from how, this far out, they could do anything, it didn’t even matter.”
It’s a heart breaking moment of horrific realization. And it is only with that, it is only by reckoning with the crimes of the past, that there can be any hope of, if not resolution – perhaps that’s not possible—restitution neither—but some kind of forward movement, growth—life. And this is true regardless of whether we’re talking about an elk hunt gone wrong or any of the endless inherited traumas of human social life. Our history is full of horror and if we never open ourselves to it, endure it, build empathy out of it, and seek in whatever limited manner we can to heal from it, we will doom ourselves to carry it without end.
Anyway, it was a solid read. I recommend it strongly and am eager to check out something else by Stephen Graham Jones. I understand his new book, “My Heart is a Chainsaw” is supposed to be worthwhile. Perhaps I should add it to my basket.