Identity and Cultural Erasure in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

The Thematic Claim

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter mounts a relentless argument that cultural erasure is not a passive forgetting but an active, violent process—and that identity survives only through deliberate, painful acts of remembering. The novel centers on Good Stab, a Blackfeet man whose many names map the layers of loss and resistance he has endured. His story, confessed to the Lutheran pastor Arthur Beaucarne, unfolds alongside the pastor’s own buried guilt for his role in the Marias Massacre. Their intertwined narratives reveal that identity can be stripped away, renamed, and physically inscribed, but never fully extinguished.

Part One: Naming as Erasure and Survival

Good Stab introduces himself to the pastor with a litany of former names: Weasel Plume, Good Stab, and the nicknames Takes No Scalps and The Fullblood. Each name represents a different chapter of his life—a boy before the smallpox, a warrior after the massacre, a man who has stopped counting kills, and a label imposed by outsiders. His habit of giving all his names at once is itself a form of resistance: he refuses to let the pastor choose which name matters. By the end of the novel, we learn that Good Stab also went by Blackie during his time as a captive in the Cat Man’s lodge, a name forced on him to erase his Pikuni identity. Yet he reclaims agency by telling his own story in his own order, using the pastor as a scribe but never as an interpreter.

The pastor, in contrast, has only one name—Three-Persons—which Good Stab insists on using. This is a direct challenge to the pastor’s authority. By calling him Three-Persons, Good Stab refuses to acknowledge his clerical title (Father or Pastor) and instead names him after the Christian trinity, a subtle mockery of the missionary project that sought to replace Blackfeet spirituality. The pastor’s eventual confession that he was present at the Marias Massacre—where soldiers killed mostly women, children, and elders—reveals that his guilt is also an identity. He has lived for decades as a man who watched and did nothing. Good Stab’s naming forces him to confront that self.

Part Two: The Pastor’s Guilt and the Massacre That Won’t Die

The Marias Massacre of 1870 is the novel’s traumatic core. The pastor, then a young Lutheran minister attached to the cavalry, was present when Joseph Cobell—guided, he claims, by Arthur Beaucarne—led soldiers to the wrong camp. Heavy Runner’s band, already sick with smallpox, offered no resistance. The soldiers killed over two hundred Blackfeet, many of them infants and elders. In his 1912 confession to Good Stab, the pastor breaks down: “Because you were just Indians!” he bellows, then immediately collapses into shame. This outburst is the moment when the rhetoric of erasure becomes audible—a justification that dehumanizes victims so that violence feels permitted.

Good Stab’s response is devastatingly quiet. He asks, “Why?” again and again, until the pastor admits he doesn’t know. The pastor’s guilt is not redemptive; it is stagnant. He has spent forty years feeding stray dogs and performing meaningless rituals (like breaking eggs to test for evil spirits) to avoid facing his complicity. His identity as a pastor is a hollow shell, a “black robe” that covers a man who helped destroy a nation. Good Stab’s confession, then, is also a trial. He forces the pastor to relive the massacre not as a historian but as a perpetrator.

Part Three: The Cat Man and the Nachzehrer as Symbols of Cultural Theft

The Cat Man introduces a supernatural dimension to erasure. An ancient European vampire—a nachzehrer—he preys on the Small Robes band by assuming a Pikuni form and corrupting their traditions. Good Stab describes how the Cat Man made children perform a false Sun Dance, pushing wooden pegs through Good Stab’s chest and making him dance until he bled. The Cat Man wears black glasses, the same kind that Good Stab later uses to protect his light-sensitive eyes—a direct visual link between the monster and the man who destroyed him.

The nachzehrer is not merely a monster; it is a figure for assimilation. It does not kill quickly but slowly transforms its victims into something unrecognizable. Good Stab, after killing the Cat Man, traps him in a cage and feeds him fish for years until his skin turns silver and his eyes migrate to the sides of his head—he becomes a sturgeon. This grotesque metamorphosis literalizes what forced assimilation does: it changes a being into something alien, trapped in an element not its own. Yet Good Stab cannot fully destroy the nachzehrer; he only transforms it, just as the memory of the Cat Man survives in his own bloodline.

The buffalo robe appears in the pastor’s final service, laid on the podium as a silent accusation. The robe is a symbol of Blackfeet sustenance and identity—the buffalo was the center of their world, and its near-extinction by white hunters was a form of erasure. When the pastor sees the church filled with the dead—Blackfeet and his own relatives—he knows the robe is a summons. He flees, but Good Stab is waiting.

Part Four: Etsy Beaucarne and the Destruction of the Journal

In the present-day timeline, Etsy Beaucarne—the pastor’s great-great-great-granddaughter—discovers the journal and transcribes it, hoping to earn tenure. She is a textual parasite, feeding on her ancestor’s sin without understanding its weight. When she learns the journal is bound in human skin, she is horrified but also compelled to act. She destroys the journal with her father’s ashes, a ritual that dissolves the physical record of the pastor’s guilt. But she also kills the transformed Arthur Beaucarne—now a giant prairie-dog monster—at the massacre site, using a nail gun and cable saw.

Etsy’s actions are ambiguous. She ends the cycle of violence, but she also destroys evidence. By burning the journal, she silences the pastor’s confession, erasing the textual record of the massacre. Yet Good Stab, watching from the riverbank, nods in acknowledgment. His nod suggests that the destruction of the written word is not erasure but liberation: the story no longer needs a book because it lives in the land and in the people. Etsy’s final act is to meet Good Stab, who reveals he was the construction worker who found the journal—a man who could have kept it hidden but chose to let it surface. His identity as a modern Blackfeet worker, wearing a hard hat as a “bright yellow knee,” bridges the century between the massacre and the present, proving that erasure is never complete.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel complicates the idea of fixed identity. Good Stab is both victim and killer; he has taken many lives, including those of buffalo hunters who skinned Pikuni bodies. The line between colonizer and colonized blurs: the Blackfeet also engaged in violence, and the pastor is not simply a villain but a man consumed by guilt. Even the nachzehrer, an imported European evil, becomes a vehicle for Blackfeet vengeance when Good Stab uses it to punish Arthur Beaucarne. The act of erasure is not one-directional; it is a struggle where both sides are transformed.

The symbol of the raven feather appears on Amos Short Ribs’ hat when he visits the pastor’s church. The raven is a trickster figure in Blackfeet lore, associated with transformation and mischief. Its presence suggests that identity can be fluid and that survival sometimes requires trickery. Good Stab himself is a trickster, appearing in different guises (construction worker, fullblood, nachzehrer) to unsettle expectations. The novel refuses to give him a single, stable name.

Study Questions and Answers

1. How does Good Stab’s multiple naming strategy resist cultural erasure?
Good Stab recites all his names—Weasel Plume, Good Stab, Takes No Scalps, The Fullblood—to prevent the pastor from reducing him to a single category. Each name carries a history, and by offering them all, he asserts that his identity cannot be simplified. The pastor, by contrast, is stuck with the nickname Three-Persons, which Good Stab uses to deny him authority.

2. What role does the Marias Massacre play in the pastor’s character development?
The massacre is the pastor’s original sin. His presence at the killing of Heavy Runner’s camp haunts him for forty years, and his confession to Good Stab forces him to admit that he was not merely a bystander but a participant. His guilt is static—he never performs meaningful repentance—but the confession itself is the first honest act of his life.

3. How does the nachzehrer function as a symbol of forced assimilation?
The nachzehrer, a European vampire, infiltrates the Small Robes band and corrupts their sacred ceremonies, making children perform a fake Sun Dance. It does not kill quickly but slowly transforms Good Stab by feeding him fish until he becomes a sturgeon. This literal metamorphosis mirrors how assimilation tries to change a people into something unrecognizable, trapping them in an alien element.

4. Why does Etsy destroy the journal, and is this an act of erasure or healing?
Etsy destroys the journal with her father’s ashes to stop the cycle of revenge. The physical book—bound in human skin—is a relic of violence. By burning it, she removes the evidence but also the trauma from the archive. Good Stab’s approving nod suggests that the story can live on in memory rather than paper. It is both erasure (of the written record) and healing (of the curse).

5. In what ways does the novel suggest that cultural identity can survive even after physical erasure?
Good Stab survives into the twenty-first century, working as a construction worker in a hard hat. His presence in Etsy’s time shows that Blackfeet identity persists despite massacres, starvation, and forced assimilation. The final image of him riding west into the storm, “folded into the Blackfeet,” implies that the people will continue to exist, even if their history is written in erased journals and unburied dead.