But, when they find a small doe herd, they open fire and kill far more animals than they can haul back. It was still the season and at least one of them had a permit. When they were teenagers, on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, they went hunting. Through Lewis, we learn just what the quartet of friends-Ricky, Lewis, Cass, and Gabe-did that set a strange figure, the Elk Head Woman, after them. From this section about Ricky, we move on to Lewis Clarke (he was teased a lot when he lived on the reservation) in an even more troubling section in which Lewis appears to lose his mind even though his life seems ideal. While we see the short, brutal end of a man who is attacked by what appears to be a young elk only to accidentally damage a couple of trucks belonging to a bunch of drunk white men who’ve just come out of the bar, the headlines repeat old cliches about drunk Indians. The first is the shortest and is full of headlines that tell us exactly how what unfolds will be portrayed in the media.

The Only Good Indian is comprised of four sections. This refrain also highlights the fact that this book seems to be all about doomed four Blackfeet men after they commit a crime against nature so egregious that something wants them to pay for it with their lives.

That there is so much tension and makeshift ceremonies and practices constantly drew my attention to how disrupted the Blackfeet people are in this novel–so much so that the generations barely seem to have any continuity between them. Throughout Stephen Graham Jones’s challenging novel, The Only Good Indians, characters constantly refer to how they’re winging things when they attempt to practice traditional indigenous ceremonies and their worries about what it means to be “Indian.” In fact, at one point, the main protagonists have a small argument about their use of the name “Indian,” when younger generations have been labeled and use the labels indigenous or native.

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