Plot
A Blackfeet man named Ricky 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.
Lewis, one of Ricky's childhood friends, has likewise since moved off their reservation and married a white woman named Peta. One night, while fixing a malfunctioning 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 shoot a large number of 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 rope in their backyard in an apparent accident, still alive. They attempt to nurse the dog back to health, but Lewis finds the dog brutally stomped to death one morning with a pair of boots he and Peta 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. When Peta returns home, Lewis startles her while she is working on the ceiling fan light, causing her to fall and fatally hit her head. He removes both Shaney and Peta's teeth to look for ivory as proof that they are elk, and noticing that Peta appears to be pregnant, cuts an elk calf out of her body. With the calf, he flees towards the reservation through the wilderness, before being shot to death in the ensuing manhunt. The elk spirit, Po'noka, is revealed to be real, and seeking to kill all of the friends to avenge her herd and her calf. She is rapidly growing into a human woman's appearance, and hitchhikes back to the reservation.
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 troubled son of local cop Victor Yellow Tail. While they are in the sweat lodge, Victor is attacked by the elk spirit. Gabe leaves the lodge to pee and finds Cass' dogs badly bludgeoned; he mercy-kills the final dog with a rock, and decides not to tell Cass until they are done. Returning to the lodge, he brings an old thermos he finds for a water scoop, which Cass recognizes as the hiding place where he keeps his money and an engagement ring he bought for his girlfriend Jo. Believing that Gabe stole the money and engagement ring, and finding his dogs dead outside, Cass starts a violent fight with Gabe. Gabe rocks Cass' fixer-upper truck off its cinderblocks, unaware that Cass' girlfriend 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.
Denorah arrives to collect her winnings from the bet, and meets the elk headed woman disguised as Shaney. 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 anymore 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, extremely 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, and from the ground births a living calf. Denorah's stepfather, the same game warden that interrupted her father's hunt, 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.
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. [4]
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 hateful 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. [5]
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. [6] 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. [7]
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. [8]
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. [9] [10]
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. [11]
The plot of TheOnly 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 leftover 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. [12]
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.” [13]
