The Only Good Indians (Spoilers)

Introduction

The title of this book is a good place to start discussing its meaning. When I first heard of this book, I used to casually refer to it as “Only Good Indians” and was always thrown off when I remembered it started with “the”. Now that I have read the book, its incomplete nature makes sense, as I believe it to be the first half of the classic American phrase “The only good Indian is a dead one.” I do mean classic. Just as the incident is framed around Thanksgiving, and even the central inciting incident is called the Thanksgiving Classic, calling attention to how Native American death and disappearance is a central thread throughout the history of the United States, and into the present day. It also interrogates this concept of “good” through its discussion of the reality that context and presentation construct our perceptions of morality, and its demonstration of the societal barriers that prevent Native American lives from holding value while living. 

Though the conduit of horror is the character Po’noka (Ponokaotokaanaakii), the true horror detailed in this book is the realities that the project of America has affected onto Native life. The instances of death that we encounter in the novel are reflective of stories that you would hear of Native American deaths in history books or newspapers. 

We see Native life as it has been forced to exist in American history, incidental and passing to the greater narrative of white America. This is reflected in the various newspaper headlines that Lewis crafts as he moves through life, statements that depersonalize him and the world around him, often for the purpose of mockery. 

Transitivity, the Deer Woman and the Human Condition

The character of Po’noka is also significant. She is a spiritual entity that appears across various native tribes, and is known by many names, but all with similar meanings and representations. She is meant to be an avenging spirit for women and children who have experienced violence at the hands of abusive men. 

There is a really good article by Isabell Retamoza called “The Deer Woman and A Collective Return to Equality”  that does a good job of covering her history. She is a cultural figure, and as such the wrongs she is seeking to remedy go beyond individual instances of violence. The characters of Lewis, Cass, Ricky, and Gabe, are all Native American men whose spiritual transgressions eventually led them to the taboo act that leads to their curse. 

Towards the end of the Retamoza article, there is an interesting passage that discusses the nonbinary nature of The Deer Woman, saying “​​the characteristics of a woman’s body and the body of a stag so the Deer Woman is neither a woman or a man, nor human or animal. As a powerful spirit being that embodies a non-binary identity, this story provokes an untangling of the imposed colonial gender hierarchy from Cherokee culture.” (Remoza)

This observation stricks similar chords to ones in the book “Black on Both Sides” by C. Riley Snorton. The book focuses on the history of the context of “trans” and the mechanics of ontology and axiology that has been attached to it throughout America's history, particularly as it relates to the Black experience. As a result,  book primarily focuses on the experiences of Black Americans, but the discussion it hosts regarding the index of “trans” for the dispossessed of America bears importance here, saying

“Such a view necessitates drawing on multiple meanings of ‘transitive,’ not only as a term that articulates the quality of ‘passing into another condition, changeable, changeful; passing away, transient, transitory,’ but also in terms of the mechanics of grammar…the transitive provides critical insight into the transubstantiation of things, and this study begins by tracing the circulation of ‘black’ and ‘trans’ as they have been constituted as fungible, thingified, and interchangeable” (Pg. 5)

This analysis is rooted in the work that language performs in constructing our realities and the meanings we attach to them.  First looking at “trans” as a lexical category, as a word that represents a catalyzing effect in grammar when attached, representing a change(i.e. transform, translate, transplant) but in and of itself occupies no static meaning. The book argues that blackness and transness occupy this same space between/before meaning, allowing their racial and gender identities to be reorganized in accordance to the demands of a society that judges their bodies as capital, an us-them binary of axiology that reduces the “them” into disembodied flesh. 

This reduction of personhood to “flesh” creates an interchangeability and depersonalization that allows people to become commodities to be used in service of the state. For Native Americans, this presents itself in instances such as scalping, the kidnapping of children and breaking of families through Indian boarding schools, and sexual violence, all systems that fed some aspect of the colonizing project and made possible through the depersonalization of their identities. 

Keep in mind I am summarizing a much more complex and nuanced theory, but essentially it discusses the ways in which the bodies of the dispossessed were often indexed as subhuman, and incidentally stripping them of the significators of gender and sex, proving their malleability in the service of capitalism. 

Paradoxically, this space of “trans” is a primordial state of being from which any configuration of being may emerge, and as such is a threat to a system that is reliant on the binary of gender to define its power hierarchy via patriarchy. 

Apologies if I have gotten perhaps a bit too esoteric, but I shall attempt to simplify this concept, while bearing in mind its failings to address the severity and complexity of this topic. It is sort of like when people get into situationships instead of a full-blown relationship.The ambiguity in your definition of the relationship makes it so you have the opportunity to manipulate the truth of the relationship to whatever benefit you would like. If you want to flirt or have sex with someone else you can say “We’re not together” and if you want to feel a connection or perhaps give the appearance of being in a traditional relationship, you can claim them. When you incorporate the power dynamics at play, this control over the definition of the relationship becomes a power to define reality itself.

Returning back to the figure of Po’noka, we can read her existence within this book as a substantiation of this primordial space of “trans”.  Po’noka’s exists as both a singular entity and a spiritual extension of nature. The guys’ conflict with Po’noka, therefore also creates a multiplicity of symbolism in which her corrupted relationships with them is representative of both their relationship with both women and nature. 

She appears in a state of both being and non-being, where the marks of her presence in the world are effectively erased as they are made, ascribed to one risk factor of native life or another like alcoholism, suicide, or hate crimes.

At the beginning of the novel, she was literally only visible in gaps and in-between spaces, flashing in and out of reality. Only existing in the margins of the greater American society, but in that obscurity we also see a freedom of expression and being in Po’noka’s existence that she leverages to acquire retribution. 

Greed and Community

The Remoza article also references a Native American myth that tells of the origin of mosquitos, a tale that warns against gluttonous violence, and we see this same transgression made by the characters when they massacre the herd. 

It is significant that the reason that they choose to trespass into the Elder hunting grounds where this occurred is that they are chasing a sense of manhood, and Lewis gets so consumed in this pursuit he becomes numb to the injury he was literally committing on himself as the rifle scope bruised his eye socket to the point of bleeding. 

They find that expression of power in their brief but charged bloodlust, and afterward spend their lives running from their mistake rather than seeking to heal it. 

As we meet the rest of the characters a decade later, we see that many of them have effectively had their lives arrested at this moment. That this violence that occurred has also wounded them as well as the community as a whole. Though the characters of Lewis, Cass, Gabe, and Ricky “earn” their fates through their actions, the novel acknowledges the larger context that allows for stories like theirs to be repeated throughout history.

This is why the deaths we witness of Ricky and Lewis are at the hands of Po’noka, but we are shown it through the dispassionate lens of America, as a Native man beaten to death outside some random bar, and the other branded fugitive and shot with little fanfare or aftermath. 

The most violent deaths that we are witness to are the ones that result from intercommunity violence: Gabe killing Cass, Gabe killing himself, and Lewis’s murder of Shaney. 

When discussing Gabe’s murder of Cass, it is important to look at the context by which this moment comes about to understand it. This sweat that Cass and Gabe are hosting is one that they are conducting as a funky finger production. They pull together a ramshackle setup, charge their community members to host it, and are blundering their way through its performance. This could be seen as a nice gesture as they are hosting it to help Nathan, but ultimately it is the blind leading the blind, and they are very blind. 

They acknowledge the sweat as “medicine” but neither Cass nor Gabe have been involved in one in a long time, and any medicine applied incorrectly can likely become a poison. Their neglect of the proper practices creates the conditions for their deaths, with Gabe’s drinking resulting not only in his neglect to notice Po’noka wreaking havoc in the darkness but also eventually leading to the fight between him and Cass that results in both their deaths. 

Various junctures of the scene itself support this reading, with the ways in which the true “monster” for much of this scene is dysfunction and distrust that leads to Gabe and Cass, decade-long friends, escalating to the point of violent murder over a series of misunderstandings. 

Gabe’s subsequent suicide comes at the command of Po’noka, but as we discussed the figure of Po’noka is both present and invisible, and Gabe’s spirit is broken by the time he is faced with this choice. He commits the deed with his father’s Mauser, and the weapon’s very presence is a representation of broken community bonds, as it arrives in this moment as a result of Gabe stealing it from his father. 

Shaney’s death is significant because it represents a temporal convergence of violence, once we realize that Po’noka and Shaney are the same being. It is by far the most graphic death that we are witness to in this book, and this is done on purpose. We are, in a way, witnessing a murder occur in that moment as a recreation of Lewis’s original act of violence against her a decade past. Seeing the method Lewis uses to murder Shaney, effectively scalping her, we see another layer of temporality as it becomes a symbol of not only the history of violence against Native people but also of Lewis’ participation in that system’s destruction of his community with his actions. It is at once a story told, in the process of its occurrence, and warning against its future recreation.

Conclusion

It took some time for this book to grow on me, but with time I have really come to appreciate it for its symbolic construction, and adherence to folkloric tradition when crafting the meaning and plot of the book. I initially struggled a bit with the pacing of the book, particularly in the second half, but ultimately enjoyed it and could ascribe some of my negative sentiments to expectations I had for this book as a “horror” novel. I will definitely be reading more Stephen  Graham Jones in the future, the only questions to figure out are the what and when.

Citations

Jones, Stephen Graham. The Only Good Indians. Gallery / Saga Press, 2020.

Retamoza, Isabell “The Deer Woman and a Collective Return to Equality (Isabell Retamoza).” AllCreation.Org, AllCreation.org, 23 Sept. 2021, www.allcreation.org/home/the-deer-woman.

Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

New Words and Terms

Creosote

• a dark brown oil distilled from coal tar and used as a wood preservative. It contains a number of phenols, cresols, and other organic compounds.

Gambrels

• a roof with two sides, each of which has a shallower slope above a steeper one.