The Only Good Indians

Prologue A Blackfeet man named Ricky, who long ago fled his reservation and now works in North Dakota, leaves a bar and finds an elk stumbling into several cars in the parking lot, damaging them. Ricky is caught outside with the damaged cars by the white bar-goers, and chased by them into a field, where he sees the reflections of the eyes of a herd of elk. Ricky is beaten to death. The House That Ran Red Lewis, one of Ricky's childhood friends, has likewise moved off their reservation and married a white woman named Peta. One night, while fixing an overhead fan light, Lewis sees the image of a dead elk on the floor below and almost falls to his death, saved by Peta at the last moment. To Peta and his coworker Shaney, a Crow woman, Lewis shamefully recounts an incident in his adolescence, where Lewis, Ricky, and their friends Gabe and Cass pursued a herd of elk into the elders' section of the reservation, where they were not legally or traditionally allowed to hunt, and shot many unsuspecting elk. Lewis is disturbed that one of the shot elk, a young female, has not died, and shoots her several more times before discovering that she is pregnant. After burying the fetus, he commits to using every portion of the mother elk and giving her meat away to the elders, but the four are stopped at their truck by the game warden and forced to dispose of the elk. Lewis and Peta's dog is found hanged by its tether in an apparent accident, still alive. They try to nurse the dog back to health, but find the dog brutally stomped to death one morning by someone wearing a pair of boots they keep in their garage. Plagued by paranoia that the elk from his adolescence has returned for revenge, Lewis becomes suspicious of Shaney's behavior, and is convinced she is the embodiment of the elk spirit. He invites her over and engineers an accident with his motorcycle that brutally kills her. Peta returns home, oblivious, and goes to fix the ceiling fan light. Lewis startles her, causing her to fall and fatally hit her head. He pulls both women's teeth to look for ivory as proof that they are elk, and, noticing that Peta appears to be pregnant, cuts her open. An elk calf emerges from her body. Lewis takes the calf and goes on the run, hoping to return it to the reservation and end the curse, but is shot to death by police before he can make it there. The elk spirit, seeking to avenge the deaths of her and her calf at the hands of Lewis and his friends, slips away and assumes a rapidly aging human form. Now looking like a teenage girl, she hitchhikes her way to the reservation. Sweat Lodge Massacre Cass and Gabe, who still live on the reservation, are preparing for a sweat lodge ceremony hosted by Cass. Gabe, now an alcoholic absentee father, stops to see his daughter Denorah before her basketball game later that day. They make a bet over Denorah's free throws, which she wins. Cass and Gabe begin the sweat with Nathan Yellow Tail, the son of local cop Victor Yellow Tail. While they are in the sweat lodge, Victor is attacked by the elk spirit. Cass briefly leaves the lodge, wondering where Victor is, and meets his girlfriend Jo, who has returned home early from work. She needs the money Cass has been saving in a Thermos in his fixer-upper truck to visit a relative; it turns out that Shaney was her cousin. Later, Gabe leaves the lodge to pee and finds Cass's dogs, stomped to death; he mercy-kills the final dog with a rock. Thinking that the dogs must have been trampled by horses, Gabe decides not to tell Cass and returns to the sweat, picking up an old Thermos to use as a water scoop. However, Cass recognizes the Thermos as the one he had left in his truck. Believing that Gabe stole the money, and finding his dogs dead outside, Cass starts a fight with Gabe. Gabe rocks Cass' fixer-upper truck off its cinderblocks, unaware that Jo is hiding underneath, crushing and killing her. Cass attempts to shoot Gabe, but instead hits what appears to be Denorah, and in his guilt allows Gabe to beat him to death. Gabe discovers that Cass had actually shot Nathan, and they are approached by the elk spirit, who agrees to spare Denorah if Gabe kills himself. However, once Gabe does so, she acknowledges that she plans to kill Denorah regardless, as Denorah is Gabe's "calf". It Came From the Rez Denorah arrives to collect her winnings from the bet, and meets the elk headed woman, now disguised as Shaney, who has hidden the bodies from the night before. The elk spirit tells Denorah the men are out on the horses, and challenges her to an intense game of basketball. Eventually the elk spirit is unable to hide her nature any more due to her injuries, and transforms into an elk-headed figure with the body of a woman, beginning a long pursuit of Denorah through the snowy reservation. Denorah encounters Nathan, wounded on one of the horses, and sends him back to town to alert her stepfather. At the end of her endurance, Denorah stumbles into the site of the elk massacre from her father's youth. The elk headed woman catches up to her but becomes preoccupied with the site where Lewis buried her calf fetus. She digs into the soil, and her calf emerges from the ground, still alive. Denorah's stepfather, Denny, the same game warden that interrupted her father's hunt years before, arrives to save her, but Denorah stops him from killing the elk headed woman and her calf, ending the cycle. The elk spirit sheds her humanity, and retreats into the wilderness as an elk again with her calf. It is implied that Denorah will go on to become a star basketball player. == Themes ==

Blackfeet culture Stephen Graham Jones, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, uses his characters and his novel to pay tribute to Blackfeet culture, practices, and life on the reservation all while tackling themes such as leaving the reservation, marriage to a white woman, representation in sports, and addiction. Two of the largest themes are directly displayed on the novel cover; the title and the elk. Title The title of the novel references a significant theme of the novel, that being a recurring reference to the malicious invective “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” This proverb has been in circulation within the United States since General Philip Sheridan’s first use of it in the 1860s. The phrase has been used across media and literature since, and through The Only Good Indians, Jones continues to address the use of such slurs against Native populations. Elk Another major theme is that of the elk. Many Native American Tribes, such as Shawnee, Cree, and Lakota, hold the elk in very high esteem. The elk is seen as a survivor and also a protector, playing key roles in stories of oral tradition, typically roles that present teaching opportunities. In this novel, the elk is not only a teacher, but an avenger; an entity that lives to make the characters atone for their wrongdoings. Environmental fears Carlos Tkacz asserts that this novel is a form of ecohorror: a genre of horror that contends with and responds to fears about Earth’s climate and environment. He writes that the novel deals with fears of environmental destruction and that Jones combines awareness of modern ecological issues with the history of violence against indigenous peoples. Violence and womanhood The novel also contends with the theme of womanhood and violence against indigenous women. The elk head woman loses her calf in the elk death scene and inhabits a human woman’s body for the second half of the novel. The scene where her calf is cut out of her body after her original death is similar to the scene where Lewis kills Peta and cuts the elk calf out of her corpse. Denorah also follows a path that is similar to the "final girl" horror trope in the novel. In this novel, the elk also occupies a similar role to the mythical figure of the Deer Woman that is present in many Indigenous cultures, who commonly acts as a symbol of fertility or a creature that leads men to their death by seducing them. == Development ==

Jones stated that the idea for The Only Good Indians likely began to develop while he and his wife were renting a home in Gunbarrel, Colorado. He also believes that the genesis of the book may have been from an event in his childhood, where his uncle stopped him from hunting a mother grizzly bear. The plot of The Only Good Indians revolves around the tragic events of a hunt years prior. Having participated in elk hunts on reservation lands since the age of 12, Jones drew from his personal experience to illustrate such an accurate and haunting situation. The core of the novel, however, comes from a time in which Jones moved from West Texas to Colorado. Jones could not transport the frozen elk meat he had left over from previous hunts, leaving him no option but to go door-to-door giving the elk meat away. Jones stated that he felt so poorly not knowing exactly what happened to the elk, thus not fulfilling his promise to himself or his wife to use the whole elk after the hunt. Jones has noted that the novel was somewhat of a departure from his normal writings, a process that he enjoyed, and that the book "came in three parts". He found writing on hunting to be the biggest challenge as he can "fake it on cars and fake it on people, but I have to get it right for the hunters.” ==Release==

The Only Good Indians was published in hardback and e-book formats on July 14, 2020, through Saga Press. The novel was also released in the United Kingdom through Titan Books on July 21, 2020. == Reception ==

The novel received reviews from outlets such as The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, the latter of which wrote that the novel "strains to weave a horror story with robust character studies. In the end, there is enough in each strand to appeal to both the genre fan and the literary reader, even if neither is fully reconciled to the other." NPR praised Jones as "one of the best writers working today regardless of genre" and stating that "Besides the creeping horror and gory poetry, The Only Good Indians does a lot in terms of illuminating Native American life from the inside, offering insights into how old traditions and modern living collide in contemporary life." Accolades == References ==