The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

 The Only Good Indians

by Stephen Graham Jones

One Saturday before Thanksgiving four Blackfeet men decide to go hunting on tribal elder land where the stumble on a herd of elk. Delighted, they fire into the herd, killing man, including a cow that is pregnant with a calf. The men think they will fill their freezers for the whole year, but are found and fined, losing their hunting rights for a period of ten years. One of the men, Lewis, killed the pregnant cow and her calf, burying it.

Years later the men start dying one by one. First is Ricky, tricked by an elk that caused damage to a bunch of vehicles at a bar making it look like Ricky did it. He gets beat to death by the men in the bar.

Next is Lewis, living with his white wife and dog off the reservation. Lewis starts seeing an elk woman and devises a scheme to figure out who it is, knowing that something supernatural is happening because of the elk hunt years ago. He harbors a lot of guilt over it. He suspects his co-worker and then his wife, killing both in his frantic attempt to uncover the source of the elk woman. Turns out, he's not so crazy. An elk lives inside his pregnant wife. He cuts the calf loose and makes his way back to the rez, only to be gunned down as a murderer before he gets there. Both his body and the calf are loaded into a truck cab and driven away, but the elk calf emerges from it a teenage girl who flees.

Now in human form and getting older quickly, the elk woman hunts for the other two men: Gabe and Cass. She finds them and destroys their lives in one night. The elk woman has a knack for creating circumstances that drive these men, like Lewis, into a state of paranoia and rage.

This book got a lot of buzz and I was excited to read it. But I don't think I was as impressed with it as most everyone else seemed to be. I read this as a buddy read with a non-US resident and it was interesting to see how the slangy rez style of speech would translate outside of the US. I don't think it was successful on that front. But this book is written in Stephen Graham Jones's style, a style that is perhaps not intended to be anything but true to a people and a place. It is a story about tradition versus contemporary life, and about the guilt carried by some indigenous people who want to let those traditions go. But is it a good thing to forget them? It's also about masculinity, and pride in the face of the great ones who lived before. Are these four men good people? Are they good Indians? Are they failing their community, their families, themselves?

For me, this book was a little too heavy on the basketball element that weaves throughout most of the narrative. I didn't care about that and couldn't connect to it. It also was maybe a little too heavy on the clever language and slang use for my tastes. My favorite parts were the parts with Gabe and Cass, whose relationship was easy yet strained in some ways. There was a good tension between them, but a familiarity that felt real. The idea of a couple of men who have a lot to be forgiven for taking a younger boy under their wing to try to get him on the right path is a trope I'm into, and I actually wish for a book with more of that. The last section seemed like a reach for me. It was a typical horror trope where the last girl standing is stalked by the beast until she finally wins. It seemed tacked on to fulfill an ending and struck me as contrived.

I think The Only Good Indians is just a 3.5 star read for me.