His Hunting Troubles: Contemporary Indigenous Identity and the Prey’s Revenge in Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians

Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians (2020) weaves a horror story of various layers, exposing problematic masculinity and mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples all while unraveling the implications of the hunt for both hunter and prey. At these intersections, this article focalizes the more-than-human’s narrative as an in-depth insight into the fear and revenge that remains otherwise unseen in narratives regarding hunting practices. In developing a close analysis, the chapter argues that Jones’s novel creates precarity with the vulnerable, collapsing the boundaries between hunter and hunted to reflect larger questions of the ethics of hunting and the practice’s connection to identity. The chapter thus contributes to the discussion of contemporary hunting and traditional, gendered practices. Furthermore, in taking the unique perspective of the prey animal into consideration to dissolve the dichotomies established in hunting stories (hunter/prey, human/animal, perpetrator/victim), the chapter provides new and alternative lenses with which hunting may be conceptualized in narrative form.