The Only Good Indians
by Stephen Graham Jones
Gallery / Saga Press, 2021. $16.99
Reviewed by Haley Lawson
Stephen Graham Jones’ novel The Only Good Indians transports readers to the northwest, shifting between North Dakota, Montana, and the frigid outskirts of a Blackfeet reservation. The wide-open fields seem equal parts ancient and modern as scenes flow seamlessly between basketball games to coming-of-age rituals that make up the daily lives of these characters. Jones’ descriptive writing of the landscape is so evocative that readers can smell the heady scent of manure, the mild sweetness of corn and grain in the air. The sky feels bigger there as if the horizon reaches well beyond the mountains. Highways cut through vast prairies only interrupted by a rogue barn house or pumpjack. The setting makes one wonder, what could be lurking out there?
Jones writes about cold November hunting grounds that evoke a time when horsemen were in control, and being Native was neither good nor bad, but free. He takes us from snow stilled hunting grounds to a modern-day makeshift sweat lodge, and there is a reverence in these places. The characters have moments of introspection that reflect on lost customs, a determination to revive their culture, and a hope for acceptance. As a member of the Blackfeet tribe and a bestselling author, Jones is adamant that his characters are always, unquestionably, Blackfeet, regardless of genre. While it may not seem like an important distinction to make, ask yourself this: when was the last time you read a thriller that had a cast of all Native characters? Having diversity outside of stories about colonization or oppression is a vital part of equal representation.
In The Only Good Indians, Native identity plays an important part in the setting and plot of the book. On a day known as “The Thanksgiving Classic,” Ricky, Gabe, Lewis, and Cassidy are desperate for a successful hunt. Suddenly, the rules of their sacred land get hazy, justifiable to break, and the four men drive onto the elders’ hunting section. It’s then that Lewis kills a young cow elk only to find out she was pregnant. He makes a vow to use every piece of her, ensuring she wouldn’t die in vain.
Ten years after The Thanksgiving Classic, Lewis starts seeing something strange . . . an Elk Head Woman. Now, the roles of predator and prey are reversed and revenge incarnate is hunting him. Hallucinations make the reader question what is real as we see dead elk lying in Lewis’ living room, or a woman with an elk face staring at him from a set of distant railroad tracks. As the hunter becomes the hunted, it is shocking to find out who survives and who succumbs to fate.
Jones crafts the novel with a unique writing style. The novel is composed with a fluidity that seemingly disregards any notion of conventional point of view. The point of view shifts from third-person, following Lewis for the first half of the novel, to second-person, told through the perspective of the Elk Head Woman. While second-person point of view can be jarring, it does effectively bring the reader into the Elk Head Woman’s world and allows us to empathize with the creature that is most frightening in the story. The perspective of the Elk Head Woman is told using the pronoun you, for example: “The way you protect your calf is you slash out with your hooves. Your own mother did that for you, high in the mountains of your first winter” (155). This insight into her motivation is intriguing and rewarding to discover as the story unfolds.
Jones’ chilling novel takes a fresh twist on the revenge trope, giving it a cultural nuance that evokes questions of identity and our links to the past. With a diverse cast of characters and an unprecedented writing style, The Only Good Indians is a must read.
Haley Lawson is an American writer and teacher. She has taught in the U.S.A., Mongolia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. After working and living abroad, she gained a new perspective on her mother tongue and started writing. Her fiction is published in The Manchester Anthology IX and The Centre for New Writing Zine. She graduated in December 2021 with a master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester. Haley writes under the pen name H. M. L. Swann.