Storied Blackfeet author’s book a touchstone of Indigenous horror,
‘The Only Good Indians’ joins growing shelf of novels that use a uniquely traditional angle
Four Blackfeet men are stalked by the vengeful spirit of an elk they slaughtered 20 years earlier (“The Only Good Indians”). A mysterious power outage plunges an isolated Anishnaabe community into a violent power struggle (“Moon of the Crusted Snow”). Indigenous people are hunted down for their bone marrow in a dystopian future (“The Marrow Thieves”) and an Inuit shaman faces off against a ravenous black wolf with red eyes (“Those Who Run in the Sky”).
Four very different novels from four very different authors, all drawing upon tropes and storylines familiar to horror and dystopian fiction fans everywhere. Dig deeper, though, and you’ll uncover a trove of themes and collective fears unique to the Indigenous experience in North America.
In Stephen Graham Jones’ new novel, “The Only Good Indians,” which is already a bestseller in its first week of release and is garnering comparisons to Jordan Peele’s horror film “Get Out” as a cultural touchstone, four young Blackfeet men pay a terrible price when they hunt on land reserved for the community’s elders. Twenty years later, an entity named Elk-head woman returns to exact brutal justice on middle-aged hunters and their families.
Jones, a Blackfeet author who has written more than 20 books and teaches literature at the University of Colorado Boulder, is reluctant to assign too many distinct characteristics to Indigenous horror. For him, it’s more a case of knowing it when he sees it. “When I read stuff by Indians,” he says, “there tends to be a lot of lightheartedness there. If you look back at the horrors we’ve faced over the last four or five hundred years — I mean, you have to find a way to laugh about it.” His novels are shot through with mordant humour. “If I want to embody some of that (Indigenous) experience, I have to include that lightheartedness.”
There are also distinct cultural concepts of justice and recompense central to what can be broadly termed Indigenous horror. Speaking of “The Only Good Indians,” Jones says, “The justice in the novel is very harsh. I mean, these four guys make a stupid mistake when they’re young and the next thing you know they’re getting decapitated! It’s like that initial mistake has accrued interest over time so that, in the end, the payback is so much bigger.”
The sense that Indigenous people pay a disproportionate price for their typically human mistakes permeates the novel. And though Elk-head woman is a monster as vicious and implacable as Jason of the “Friday the 13th” franchise or Freddy Krueger of “Nightmare on Elm Street,” she is presented throughout the novel more as a victim of violence than a perpetrator.
“I wanted to show that, yes, you make mistakes and you try to move on,” Jones explains. “But you also have to think about the victim of those mistakes. What is the proper way to think about the victim and their need for recompense? You can’t move on without answering those questions.”
Injustice and the outsize suffering of innocent victims is a collective legacy for Indigenous cultures, the novel suggests, but young people — here in the form of Denorah, the daughter of one of the hunters who faces off against Elk-head woman in the climax — have to imagine other narratives beyond survival. “When I was growing up in a small town in West Texas,” Jones says, “the Conan stories and novels were so important to my development. Being able to imagine a place like Hyperborea (the saga’s mythical setting), it was so transportive.”
As Jones points out, Indigenous horror is informed by apocalyptic violence. As the heirs to 500 years of colonial violence, pandemics, land grabs and the near-destruction of their traditional languages and cultures, Indigenous authors naturally gravitate toward the apocalyptic in their work. As an elder in Waubgeshig Rice’s haunting “Moon of the Crusted Snow” puts it so succinctly: “Apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived.”
In the typical apocalyptic novel, the survivors must fall back on their own survival skills. Fellow survivors are viewed as either uneasy allies or existential threats. “Moon of the Crusted Snow” makes a radical break from this every-person-for-themselves trope by having the survivors work together to fight the threat.
“From my own perspective as an Anishinaabe person who grew up on the rez, I know that my people have come together to rebuild after these worldending moments,” Rice explains. “We have the perspective of what is needed in times of crisis, a coming together.”
The young Indigenous survivors in Cherie Dimaline’s award-winning “The Marrow Thieves” also overcome despair and selfishness to work together. “Even in this horrible dystopian future,” Dimaline told the Star in a 2017 interview, “people are being hunted, there’s a terrible outcome; there’s still so much hope in that group of characters.”
In both novels, the survivors draw upon communal traditions and survival skills that predate colonialism, a timely metaphor for the ongoing struggle to protect Indigenous traditions from extinction. Without access to those traditions, the authors suggest, there is little hope of surviving the horrors of the modern world.
Inuit author Aviaq Johnston’s work, including her Governor General Awardnominated YA novel “Those Who Run in the Sky,” is steeped in the cultural traditions of the Arctic. When she recently edited “Taaqtumi: An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories,” she found a group of geographically dispersed authors drawing on the same font of story and tradition: “Inuit Nunangat (homeland) across the Arctic is rich with the stories our ancestors have passed on for millennia, and our unique environment and wildlife are great inspiration … A lot of our legends and stories also have creepy and gruesome themes. Scary stories are simply part of growing up in Nunavut.”
Those traditional stories, Rice agrees, are key to understanding modern Indigenous horror. “Traditionally a lot of Indigenous cultures have stories about scary things, but they are all lessons, they are all teaching moments. Of course, when you’re a kid and you hear these stories, they scare the sh-- out of you. That’s the point: You get scared and you learn from them!”