Stephen Graham Jones’s Blackfeet Books: From Revenge to Redemption

Stephen Graham Jones’s three Blackfeet novels—The Only Good Indians, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, and Off the Reservation—form a connected argument about horror and history rather than a traditional trilogy. The Only Good Indians follows four friends hunted by the Elk Head Woman after illegally hunting elk on reservation land. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, set in 1912, tells of Good Stab, a vampire created during the 1870 Marias Massacre, who feeds on those responsible for the slaughter. Off the Reservation features survivor Nate Yellow Tail retrieving a boy’s bones from Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Across the novels, the scale of wrongdoing expands from individual actions to military massacres to government institutions designed to erase Native identity. Jones, an enrolled Blackfeet member, structures the books to hold his own community accountable before addressing larger historical injustices, with revenge depicted as something that wears human skin to survive.

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