What I am is the Indian who can’t die.
I am the worst dream America ever had. (163)
Much of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is in the vein of a lot of his work: a horror novel that is concerned with Native identity and its history in America. In the SGJ books I’ve read (The Only Good Indians, the Indian Lake trilogy, I Was a Teenage Slasher), that Native identity is a contemporary one. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, on the other hand, tackles a real-life historical atrocity, The Marias Massacre of 1870, in which about 200 women, older men, and children, many suffering from smallpox, were slaughtered by U.S. Army troops in Montana territory.
However, SGJ does not recount the story of the massacre; instead, he uses the historical record (and the hunting to near extinction of the buffalo by American settlers) as the genesis of a decades-long revenge story. He uses a few nested narratives to frame his story; The Buffalo Hunter Hunter begins and ends with a struggling academic at the University of Wyoming, Etsy Beaucarne, who reads a handwritten document from 1912 authored by her great-great-great-grandfather, Lutheran preacher Arthur Beaucarne. This document alternates between Arthur’s voice and his transcriptions of his conversations with a Native man? creature? monster? who has many names but is most often referred to as Good Stab. This multilayered approach is quite a feat: Good Stab’s chapters are long and full of Native terminology, which SGJ pointedly does not define or translate. Tribes, people, natural phenomena all have multiple and interchangeable names. These chapters also contain the most graphic violence–against children, against animals, against women, and against men, SGJ does not shy away from the brutality of life in the Montana territory. It is almost a relief to read the Arthur Beaucarne (“Three-Persons”) chapters because they are short and seemingly more “civilized,” describing female churchgoers’ gifts of baked sweets and settlers’ pleasantries–but that genteel veneer barely hides the racism and self-righteousness that leads to genocide. And that veneer is soon enough pulled back as we gradually realize that Good Stab is telling this story to Three-Persons for a reason. And that reason, much more so than drinking blood, so the real horror of the novel.
I was so wrapped up in their story that I almost forgot about poor Etsy–the story returns to her in its final 50ish pages. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter concludes with her after she finishes reading her great-great-great-grandfather’s manuscript, and what happens to her is simultaneously bleak yet satisfying–much like the entire book.
