Symbols The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones

The Buffalo Robe: Symbol of Slaughter and Desecration in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

What the Buffalo Robe Literally Is

A buffalo robe is a tanned hide of the American bison, historically used by Plains Indigenous peoples for warmth, bedding, ceremonial purposes, and trade. In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, the robe appears as both a practical object and a charged emblem of colonial violence. The novel’s 1912 timeline repeatedly references robes stripped from carcasses by hide‑hunters, sold for profit, or used by characters like the trapper Napi in his dugout. The robe’s materiality—hair, hide, and the labor of dressing it—carries the memory of the herds that once covered the Great Plains.

Where the Buffalo Robe Recurs

The buffalo robe surfaces in several key moments across the dual 1912 and 2012 timelines:

  • The trapper’s shelter (Good Stab’s narrative): Inside Napi’s bluff‑side dugout, the narrator notes “robes for sleeping” (chapter 14). These are unmarked, functional hides, suggesting a pre‑contact domestic use.
  • The hide‑hunters’ camps: Good Stab repeatedly encounters fields of skinned blackhorns, their hides pegged out to dry (chapters 5, 19). The “staked robes” become a landscape of waste; the meat is often left to rot. This industrial slaughter reduces the animal to a single commodity.
  • The Pikuni hide‑hunters: Good Stab discovers Pikuni themselves killing buffalo for robes to trade for guns (chapter 19). The robe here marks a tragic erosion of cultural practice, as the hunters adopt the napikwan economy.
  • Yellow Kidney’s son: In Good Stab’s flashback, the boy’s body lies on a white buffalo robe (chapter 18). The anomalous white hide—a sacred animal in Blackfeet tradition—becomes a deathbed and a curse.
  • The church podium (June 2, 1912): During Sunday service, Pastor Three-Persons finds a buffalo robe draped over the lectern (chapter 23). This is the robe’s most significant recurrence: when he looks up, the church is filled with the ghosts of dead Blackfeet victims and his own relatives. The robe triggers a vision of unresolved massacre, forcing Three-Persons to flee.

How the Meaning Shifts

The buffalo robe undergoes a clear transformation as the novel progresses:

  1. From sacred sustenance to commodity: Initially, robes are part of a holistic use of the buffalo—meat, sinew, bone, and hide. Good Stab’s earlier life with the Small Robes band normalizes this. But as hide‑hunters and later Pikuni traders kill solely for the robe, the object loses its sacred context and becomes a token of destruction.

  2. From death shroud to altar cloth: The white robe under Yellow Kidney’s son signifies premature death and polluted luck—Good Stab feels cursed after this discovery. Decades later, the same type of robe appears on the church podium. The domestic altar of the Lutheran church is invaded by a trophy of industrial genocide, converting the space of absolution into a courtroom where the dead demand justice.

  3. From material evidence to spectral summons: In Three-Persons’s final entry, the robe is no longer just a hide; it is a portal. It summons the victims of the Marias Massacre (January 23, 1870), in which Three-Persons himself participated. The robe’s presence forces him to confess his own guilt—the hide on the podium is both accusation and proof.

Connections to Characters and Themes

Good Stab (Takes No Scalps)

Good Stab, the undead Blackfeet avenger, embodies the robe’s meaning. He calls himself “The Fullblood” because the blood of his people—spilled on the prairie where robes were taken—fills him. His rage is fueled by the ecological and human destruction that the buffalo robe symbolizes. When he sees Pikuni hide‑hunters, he kills them for betraying the buffalo’s gift. The robe on the church podium is his message: the land’s desecration has not been forgotten.

Pastor Arthur Beaucarne

Three-Persons is indirectly responsible for the Marias Massacre; his guilt festers for forty years. The robe’s appearance on his altar realizes his worst fear—that the dead want an accounting. He writes that the buffalo robe made him see “the church filled with dead Blackfeet victims and his own deceased relatives.” The robe thus functions as a confessional tool, though one that offers no absolution.

Sheriff Lacy Doyle and the Townspeople

Doyle and Livinius Clarkson treat buffalo hides as raw material for profit and tall tales. In chapter 5, Clarkson recalls a buffalo hunter who called Indians “thieves” for stealing one skinned robe. Their language reduces the robe to a stolen good, erasing the colonial violence behind its production.

Colonial Violence and Genocide (Theme)

The buffalo robe is a concrete trace of the near‑extinction of the bison—a deliberate U.S. policy to starve Plains tribes. The novel’s epigraph from the Augsburg Confession condemns “adversaries seeking blood rather than truth.” When the robe appears on the church podium, it literalizes that blood: the hide is a pelt of genocide.

Vampirism as Consumption (Theme)

Good Stab, the nachzehrer (vampire), drains blood to survive, mirroring how hide‑hunters drained the plains of buffalo. The robe is the leftover skin of that consumption—the part not devoured. In this reading, the robe on the altar is the remnant of a feast of death.

Guilt and Absolution (Theme)

Three-Persons’s encounter with the robe forces him to confront his role in the massacre. He cannot receive the absolution he sought from Good Stab because the robe speaks for the dead. His final act—walking into the prairie to die—suggests that only direct confrontation with the land’s history can bring closure.

Study Questions and Answers

  1. Why does the buffalo robe appear specifically on the church podium in the 1912 timeline?

    • The robe transforms a site of Christian worship into an indictment of colonial Christianity. Three-Persons, a Lutheran pastor complicit in the Marias Massacre, must face the physical evidence of the herds and people his church tacitly endorsed killing. The podium becomes an accuser’s stand.

  2. How does the white buffalo robe of Yellow Kidney’s son differ from the robe on the church altar?

    • The white robe carries traditional Blackfeet sacredness—the white buffalo is a powerful medicine animal. Good Stab interprets the boy’s death on it as a personal curse. The church robe is a generic, tanned hide, stripped of ceremony; its power lies not in rarity but in ubiquity—it stands for the millions of buffalo killed.

  3. In what ways does Good Stab’s identity as a nachzehrer parallel the fate of the buffalo?

    • Good Stab is killed and then “resurrected” by the Cat Man; the buffalo were killed and their remnants (robes, bones) repurposed by settlers. Both become undead in a sense: the buffalo’s ghostly presence on the prairie and in markets, Good Stab’s literal undeath. The robe on the altar unites these two unquiet spirits.

  4. What role does the buffalo robe play in the novel’s treatment of justice and revenge?

    • The robe is a silent witness. It does not enact revenge; instead, it provokes memory and confession. Justice in the novel is not violent retribution but the refusal to let the dead be forgotten. The robe ensures that Three-Persons cannot finish his service without seeing the faces of those he abandoned.