Themes The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones

Guilt and Absolution: The Price of Acknowledgment in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

The Fractured Confessional: How The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Undermines Absolution

In Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, guilt does not resolve into grace. The Lutheran pastor’s confessional framework—borrowed from the 16th‑century Apology of the Augsburg Confession—promises spiritual cleansing through remorse and divine mercy. But the novel’s central claim is that absolution is impossible without accountability for genocide. The pastor wishes to confess his sins to a higher power and be forgiven, but Good Stab insists that confession must be made to the victims, not to God. Through the pastor’s desperate self‑justifications, Good Stab’s unrelenting witness, and the supernatural transformation of Arthur Beaucarne into a monstrous prairie‑dog, the story dismantles the notion that private remorse can atone for historical violence. True absolution, Jones argues, requires acknowledgment, reparation, and the pain of facing what one has done.

The Thematic Claim: No Absolution Without Accountability

The Lutheran pastor—known only as Three‑Persons from his Blackfeet nickname—enters into a strange confessional pact with Good Stab, a Blackfeet man who has become a kind of monster (a nachzehrer, a revenant that feeds on the dead). Good Stab does not want the pastor to absolve him of his own sins; he wants to hear the pastor confess his role in the Marias Massacre of 1870. The pastor resists, arguing that the man who committed those acts is “a different man in a different life” (chapter 19). He claims to be reborn in Christ, sins washed away. But Good Stab’s repeated visits—and his tales of the dead—prove that no spiritual rebirth can undo the bloodshed. The pastoral office itself becomes a symbol of the failure of institutional religion to address systemic evil. The church mice that infest the chapel, the rotten eggs for the Eucharist, the buffalo robe that appears on the altar: all signal that God’s house has been defiled by unspoken guilt.

Tracing the Theme Across the Plot

The Pastor’s First Denials (Chapters 4–5)

Early in the diary, the pastor discovers an old letter he wrote confessing his part in the massacre. He briefly considers saving it as evidence, then throws it into the kindling hopper. He tells himself: “the guilty letter is long gone… my sins have been washed away in His blood.” This is the first major instance of the theme: the pastor tries to bury his guilt rather than acknowledge it to those he harmed. He even muses that Good Stab’s appearance must be “happenstance of geography, not yesterday’s yesterday rising in judgment.” The letter—literal proof of his crime—is destroyed to preserve his self‑image. This denial sets up the entire arc: absolution is rejected because accountability is evaded.

The Climax of Confession (Chapter 19–20)

The pastor finally writes a full account of the Marias Massacre. He describes whispering to the scout Joe Cobell, convincing him to shoot the peace chief by arguing that “no forgiveness is necessary when those you punish are naught but savages.” This is the moment the pastor stops hiding. He admits, “I fired not a single shot… but I also, in a sense, fired them all.” Still, he does not confess to Good Stab. He plans to flee Miles City and “return to the site of the greatest among my many sins” to die alone. His impulse is toward self‑punishment, not toward the face‑to‑face acknowledgment that Good Stab demands. The diary entry ends with a plea: “Let this be the end of it. Please.” But there is no ending; the story continues in the 2013 timeline.

The Failure of Ritual Absolution (Chapter 23 – The Final Diary Entry)

On June 2, 1912, the pastor attempts to conduct a Sunday service. The eggs for the Eucharist are rotten. He substitutes a fresh one, but when he looks up, the church is filled with dead Blackfeet victims and his own dead relatives. He apologizes and flees. The buffalo robe on the podium—a symbol of Blackfeet life and the slaughter—serves as the final accusation. The pastor cannot complete the liturgy; his own guilt makes the sacrament impossible. He waits for Good Stab to kill him, but the novel leaves the pastor’s fate ambiguous in the 1912 timeline. The absolution he sought from God never comes because he could not bring himself to confess to those he wronged.

Etsy’s Inheritance of Guilt (Chapter 25 – 2013)

The theme extends into the present through Etsy Beaucarne. She transcribes Arthur’s journal, only to discover it is bound in human skin—a literal binding of guilt. Good Stab reveals that Arthur has been transformed into a giant prairie‑dog monster, a punishment for his role in the massacre. Etsy kills Arthur at the massacre site using a nail gun and cable saw, then destroys the journal with her father’s ashes. She meets Good Stab by the river and learns he was the construction worker who found the journal. He rides away with the Blackfeet, ending the cycle. But note: Etsy does not offer Arthur absolution; she enacts a violent justice. The book suggests that accountability can break the supernatural hold of guilt, but only through costly action, not through easy forgiveness.

Character and Symbol Connections

  • Good Stab represents the demand for acknowledgment. He is both victim and avenger, a nachzehrer who feeds on the dead. His name itself is a performance—he has multiple names (Weasel Plume, Takes No Scalps) that signal his shifting identity. He will not let the pastor off the hook. His darkened spectacles and sensitivity to light suggest he can see truths that the pastor’s eyes avoid.

  • Arthur Beaucarne / The Pastor embodies the refusal to take responsibility. He hides behind theology, age, and the passage of time. His dairy illustrates how institutional religion can become a shield against moral reckoning.

  • The Buffalo Robe (see symbols/buffalo-robe) appears on the altar just before the pastor’s vision of the dead. It connects the destruction of the buffalo to the destruction of the Blackfeet people—both are commodities to be skinned. The robe also recalls Good Stab’s story of the white buffalo, which may represent the spiritual loss that cannot be restored.

  • The Human‑Skin Binding (symbols/human-skin-binding) of the journal literalizes the idea that guilt is inscribed onto the body. Etsy cannot hold the book without being marked by it. The binding forces her to confront the physical reality of genocide.

  • The Raven Feather (symbols/raven-feather) worn by Amos Short Ribs in the church signals that Good Stab’s presence extends beyond one man; the dead are watching. The raven is a trickster figure in many Indigenous traditions, but here it becomes a harbinger of truth.

  • The Nachzehrer (symbols/nachzehrer) is a Germanic folklore creature that rises from its grave to consume the living. Good Stab functions as a nachzehrer of memory, feeding on the unresolved past.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel does not offer a simple solution to guilt. The pastor’s own diary reveals that he is not wholly evil—he shows kindness to his parishioners, worries about mice, and enjoys yellow cake. Yet his participation in genocide is undeniable. Good Stab, while righteous, is also a monster who drinks blood and threatens violence. Is there a moment of true absolution in the book? Etsy’s act of killing Arthur might be seen as a form of accountability, but it is violent and final. And Good Stab rides away without granting forgiveness. The final image of the 2013 timeline—“he rode away with the Blackfeet, ending the cycle”—suggests closure, but closure is not forgiveness. The pastor’s pipe, empty since the Marias Massacre, implies that the connection between the living and the dead has been severed.

Another contradiction: the pastor believes in a God who can wash away sins, but the novel presents a world where the dead refuse to stay buried. The Eucharist eggs rot; the church is overrun by mice; the buffalo robe appears without explanation. The supernatural elements suggest that nature itself rejects the pastor’s easy absolution. The story asks whether any institutional religion can address crimes on the scale of genocide, or whether those crimes demand a different kind of justice—one that does not rely on divine mercy but on human acknowledgment.

Study Questions for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

1. How does the epigraph from The Apology of the Augsburg Confession set up the theme of guilt and absolution?
The epigraph accuses adversaries of seeking blood rather than truth or concord. This foreshadows the pastor’s refusal to tell the truth about his past. The Lutheran tradition of confession is subverted: Good Stab does not seek the pastor’s absolution for himself but demands that the pastor confess his own crimes. The epigraph questions who the true “adversaries” are—those who seek truth (Good Stab) or those who seek to bury it (the pastor).

2. Why does the pastor destroy the letter that documents his role in the Marias Massacre?
He calls it a “spasm of weakness” and claims that his sins are washed away in Christ’s blood. Destroying the letter allows him to maintain his self‑image as a redeemed man. But Good Stab knows the truth anyway. The act symbolically shows that the pastor prefers private self‑deception over public accountability. The letter might have served as material evidence; its destruction ensures that no one else can hold him accountable, yet the supernatural consequences remain.

3. What role does the buffalo robe play in the final church scene?
The buffalo robe appears on the podium just before the pastor sees the dead. It is a material reminder of the buffalo slaughter that devastated the Blackfeet way of life. In the context of the novel, the robe also connects to Good Stab’s story of the white buffalo and to the skinning motifs that run throughout (the “humps,” the human‑skin binding). The robe transforms the altar from a site of communion into a site of accusation.

4. How does Etsy’s discovery of the journal’s human‑skin binding affect her understanding of guilt?
She realizes that the truth she has been transcribing is literally bound in the skin of a victim. The binding forces her to accept that the violence of the Marias Massacre is not abstract—it is physically present in the artifact. Her decision to destroy the journal with her father’s ashes suggests that she rejects the pastor’s attempt to preserve his guilt in written form and instead chooses a different kind of ending, one that honors the dead by ending the cycle of vengeance.

5. Is absolution possible in the world of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter? Support your answer with evidence from the text.
The novel suggests that true absolution is impossible without accountability. The pastor never confesses directly to Good Stab; he only admits his guilt in his diary, which is later destroyed. Good Stab does not grant forgiveness—he rides away. Etsy kills Arthur at the massacre site, which is an act of justice, not absolution. The empty pipe on the last page of the pastor’s diary (he has not smoked since the massacre) indicates that the spiritual connection that once sustained him is dead. The book ends with the cycle “ending,” but not with forgiveness. Absolution, as the pastor understood it, fails because it was never meant for the victims.