Colonial Violence and Genocide: The Blackfeet Holocaust in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

Thematic Claim

In The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones confronts a foundational American atrocity—the systematic destruction of the Blackfeet people—not as a settled historical fact but as an open wound that bleeds across generations. The novel’s central argument is that colonial violence and genocide cannot be relegated to the past; they persist as spiritual and material forces that demand acknowledgment, confession, and reckoning. By weaving the supernatural figure of the nachzehrer (a vampire-like creature) into the historical record of the Marias Massacre (January 23, 1870), Jones rejects the tidy narratives of westward expansion and insists that the land, the survivors, and the dead still hold the country accountable.

Tracing the Theme Across the Plot

1. The Skinned Man and the Logic of Retribution

The novel opens in 1912 with the discovery of a man skinned on the prairie, his face painted yellow and black, his tongue removed. This grisly tableau immediately signals a return of colonial violence. The Lutheran pastor who is called to the scene learns from an old buffalo hunter that such markings were used by Blackfeet warriors on buffalo carcasses as a claim of rightful harvest—an act of taking back what was stolen. The victim is not an Indian but a white settler, and Good Stab—the Blackfeet vampire who narrates his own dark gospel—is the one exacting this punishment.

The episode establishes that the genocide of the Blackfeet was not a one-time event but a continuing process of dispossession. The buffalo hunter’s story of Indians “thieving” a skinned buffalo carcass (which they had spiritually claimed) reveals the colonial mindset that treats Indigenous subsistence as theft while ignoring the wholesale seizure of Blackfeet lands and lives. Good Stab’s method of killing—draining blood and painting faces in bisected colors—mimics the ritualistic violence of the massacre, turning the tools of the oppressor into a mirror of judgment.

2. The Confession of Arthur Beaucarne at the Marias Massacre

The thematic core of the novel explodes in Chapter 20 (“May 12, 1912”), when Good Stab corners the Lutheran pastor—revealed to be Arthur Beaucarne, Etsy’s ancestor—and forces him to confess his role in the massacre. The pastor was not a soldier but a civilian who, numbed by cold and hunger, whispered into the ear of scout Joe Cobell, convincing him that the peaceable camp was full of hostiles and that God would forgive the killing of “savages.” That whisper triggered the volley of 200 rifles against thirty lodges, killing mostly women, children, and elders who were already sick with smallpox (the “white scabs”).

The scene dismantles the myth of settler innocence. The pastor’s defense—“Because you were just Indians”—is the raw ideology of genocide, stripped of euphemism. Good Stab forces him to see not only his own culpability but the intimate human cost: the pastor learns that he unknowingly fathered a child with a prostitute after the massacre, and that child’s descendants—his own grandsons—are among the corpses Good Stab has laid out in the church. The colonial violence literally becomes a family tragedy, refuting the abstraction of “manifest destiny.”

3. Etsy Beaucarne’s Modern Reckoning

The contemporary timeline brings the theme into the present. Etsy Beaucarne, a struggling professor, transcribes her ancestor’s journal only to discover it is bound in human skin—a literal skin book that archives the atrocity. Her father dies, and the Blackfeet Nation sends her an unopened letter. At the massacre site, she uses a nail gun and cable saw to kill Arthur, who has been transformed into a giant prairie-dog monster as punishment for his role. She then destroys the journal with her father’s ashes.

This act suggests that the colonial archive cannot be preserved as a neutral document; it must be broken open and consumed. Etsy’s encounter with Good Stab by the river—where she learns he was the construction worker who found the journal—completes the cycle of testimony. The genocide is not over; it is still being pieced together by those who inherit its wounds. Etsy’s academic precarity mirrors the larger theme: the institution of the university has failed to reckon with this history, leaving it to be unearthed by the desperate and the dispossessed.

Character and Symbol Connections

Characters

Symbols

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel does not offer a simple moral calculus. Good Stab’s violence, however justified by historical grievance, makes him monstrous. He drains the blood of his victims into holes, refusing to consume it, as if even he is repelled by the logic of revenge. The Lutheran pastor’s confession is genuine, yet he remains bound to the cross of his guilt. Etsy destroys the journal, but she does not erase the truth—she releases it from the prison of the archive.

Moreover, the novel complicates the binary of colonizer and colonized by showing that Indigenous people can also perpetrate violence (the buffalo hunter anecdote describes Blackfeet warriors killing settlers), while white settlers can become victims of that retribution. The goal is not to assign blame but to expose the machinery of genocide: the way cold, hunger, boredom, and racist ideology conspire to make atrocity seem necessary and ordinary.

The ending—Good Stab riding away with the Blackfeet—suggests a tentative closure, but the nachzehrer remains undead. The cycle of violence is not broken; it is merely paused, waiting for another act of confession or forgetting.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does the nachzehrer function as a symbol of historical trauma rather than a simple monster?

The nachzehrer—a German vampire—is repurposed by Jones to embody the unburied dead of the Marias Massacre. It feeds on the living not for blood but for acknowledgment. Good Stab uses the nachzehrer’s traits (undead persistence, shape-shifting, aversion to light) to force confessions from those responsible. The creature is not evil in itself; it is the symptom of a genocide that has not been adequately mourned or atoned for. Its vampiric hunger is a metaphor for the demand that history be faced.

2. What is the significance of the bisected yellow-and-black paint applied to the victims?

The paint mirrors the markings that Blackfeet warriors traditionally applied to buffalo carcasses to claim them as spiritual gifts. By painting his white victims in the same way, Good Stab reverses the colonial logic: the colonizers become the hunted, and their bodies are claimed back as tribute. The bisected color (yellow on the right, black on the left) also references the Blackfeet creation story involving the sun and the night, suggesting that justice operates on a cosmic scale, not merely a human one.

3. Why does the Lutheran pastor’s confession fail to earn forgiveness from Good Stab?

The pastor’s confession is genuine—he admits to whispering lethal words to Joe Cobell—but it is also self-serving. He wants absolution so he can die in peace, not so that the historical record can be set right. Good Stab denies him that release, forcing him to live with the knowledge that his grandsons died because of him. Forgiveness, the novel suggests, cannot be granted unilaterally by the perpetrator; it must be earned through a transformation that the pastor never fully achieves.

4. What role does the contemporary storyline of Etsy play in understanding colonial violence?

Etsy’s narrative bridges the 1912 massacre and the present. She inherits both the journal and the genetic legacy of the perpetrator. Her denial of tenure and her father’s death mirror the institutional failures to address Indigenous history. By hunting and killing the monster that Arthur has become, she participates in the reckoning, but she also chooses to destroy the journal rather than publish it. This act implies that academic publication is insufficient; the truth must be felt and mourned, not just cataloged.

5. How does the novel challenge readers to see the Marias Massacre as an ongoing event rather than a closed chapter?

The novel’s structure—interleaving 1912, 1870, and 2013—collapses time. Good Stab is nearly eighty years old but unnaturally preserved, and he reappears in the 21st century as a construction worker. The final image of him riding away with the Blackfeet indicates that the dead have not departed; they remain present, waiting for justice. The genocide is not over because its economic and land-dispossession effects continue to shape Blackfeet lives. By refusing a neat resolution, Jones insists that American readers live in the aftermath of a holocaust that has never been fully acknowledged.