Like most Americans around my age, I was introduced to the Blackfeet nation by the 1972 Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson. The only thing fitting about the portrayal of the Blackfeet in this saccharine slice of Napikwan nostalgia is that none of the Blackfeet characters ever express an emotion much less utter a word. They’re simply disparaged by a dodgy Napikwan (Blackfeet word for “white person/people”) and dispatched callously, some in their sleep. Their scalps — though planted on Redford’s saddle — even earn Johnson a Flathead wife.
Now, over a half-century later, it’s probably just as well. The Blackfeet characters’ presence was simply that of wooden cigar-store Indians, as far removed from who they really were as any painted, wooden Christ on a wooden cross above a Napikwan pulpit. But I have a strong suspicion that a young Blackfeet boy in Texas saw the movie a little while after I did, and it definitely left an impression. Now, a rising (if not the) star of contemporary Texas letters, Blackfeet indigenous writer Stephen Graham Jones mentions Jeremiah Johnson in his latest novel, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. And payback is the plotline.
Knowing Jones a little, this is the book I’ve been looking for from him.
I loved Mongrels, his 2016 exploration of indigenous lycanthropy, and I highly recommend it. But Buffalo Hunter Hunter is something else altogether. It may be Jones’ Moby Dick, and the main character, Good Stab, is a much more layered, poignant Captain Ahab. The epistolary narrative is brilliant and sprawling, detailing major events and minor moments in ways that are pregnant with portent and implication. Good Stab is not Ken Kesey’s Chief Bromden, Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, the Lone Ranger’s Tanto, or Ismael’s friend QueeQueg. He really is Melville’s Ahab without rank or vessel, plying the Blackfeet hinterlands not in search of Moby Dick — which Melville intimated was a symbol for Christianity — but for one Christian pastor in particular, who could easily represent the entire Napikwan expansion and the American conquest and seizure of indigenous lands in general. And in some places — especially for a Napikwan like me — the tale verges on Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (without the sex).
Good Stab’s quest is existential in the starkest, least philosophical sense, so there is very little lightness. The weight and darkness of the white Anglo subjugation of the high plains is frequently unbearable and challenges the flimsy notion of what being an American means, especially as writers like Jones bring this history to the fore.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter would have been a horror story even if nonfiction, but the supernatural elements of Jones’ tale are poetic and wildly (if not morbidly) thought-provoking. The diabolical antagonist, the Cat Man, is a European or Indo-European monster loosed upon the landscape, a nightmare of the Old World, now corrupting the Blackfeet present and Napikwan New World. It infects Good Stab, and, though it costs him virtually everything, he masters the monstrosity he becomes and uses it against whence it came, exacting bizarre, codified vengeance. And though very few of Jones’ readers or his audience may be Blackfeet, they will find themselves on Good Stab’s side.
Good Stab is a dagger that’s been a long time coming. His tale is a good stab at so many things that needed to be said or reemphasized about the beauty and grace of pre-European indigenous cultures in North America and how much inhumanity we Napikwan never really answered for. It’s a wonderful though sometimes disturbing read, even if some faint-hearted Anglos may experience the harrowing sensation that they are slowly being scalped (or, in Good Stab’s way, drained of blood). It’s darkly refreshing, and it’s been a long time coming.
There’s nothing approaching the erstwhile white savior mentality so panderingly glorified in Dances with Wolves or, more recently, Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River. Good Stab uses our medicine against us, then returns to what’s left of his tribe.
And therein lies Jones’ unassuming genius. Good Stab doesn’t approach his people’s plight, his personal curse, or his quest for vengeance like the Napikwan caricatures of Stallone’s Hambo or Bruce Willis’ Dumb-Hard. Good Stab considers them, approaches them, and addresses them like an authentic Blackfeet, making all the Kevin Costners and John Waynes look like petty pilgrims and the glaring pretenders they always were.
In the narrowed and broader American conversation, there was no indigenous cause that justified or legitimized the white Anglo effect. It was more like white Anglo affectation and effect, and Jones lays all that bare. But the humanity he captures in every direction and in all parties is endearing and compelling. It’s probably better than we Napikwan deserve, and it’s captivating.
Though speculative fiction, I think The Buffalo Hunter Hunter — in terms of both information and real understanding — surpasses nonfiction classics like Empire of the Summer Moon and Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
It’s that pure and powerful.
Fort Worth native E.R. Bills is the author of seven nonfiction titles, including Tell-Tale Texas: Investigations in Infamous History.
