Indigenous Genre and Horror Writers

Picture of Stephen Graham Jones above.

Alexandra Alter has an article in today's times about native genre writers. She writes:

Cherie Dimaline, along with Waubgeshig Rice, Rebecca Roanhorse, Darcie Little Badger and Stephen Graham Jones, who has been called “the Jordan Peele of horror literature,” are some of the Indigenous novelists reshaping North American science fiction, horror and fantasy — genres in which Native writers have long been overlooked.

Their fiction often draws on Native American and First Nations mythology and narrative traditions in ways that upend stereotypes about Indigenous literature and cultures. And the authors are gaining recognition in a corner of the literary world that has traditionally been white, male and Eurocentric, rooted in Western mythology.

“There’s a big push now for the telling of Indigenous stories,” Dimaline said. “The only way I know who I am and who my community is, and the ways in which we survive and adapt, is through stories.”

As more Indigenous authors break into the genres, there has been an explosion of novels, comics, graphic novels and short stories from writers blending sci-fi and fantasy with Native narratives, writing everything from “slipstream” alternate realities to supernatural horror to post-apocalyptic stories about environmental collapse.

“There’s so much variety and so much experimentation,” said Grace L. Dillon, a professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program at Portland State University, who edited “Walking the Clouds,” an anthology of Indigenous science fiction published in 2012.

I would like to highlight the work of Stephen Graham Jones. I have read a couple of his books, including Mongrels, which I really liked. I recently got a copy of his new book, The Only Good Indians from the public library; I look forward to reading it. Here is an excerpt:

Ricky Boss Ribs.

He’d split from the reservation all at once, when his little brother Cheeto had overdosed in someone’s living room, the television, Ricky was told, tuned to that camera that just looks down on the IGA parking lot all the time. That was the part Ricky couldn’t stop cycling through his head: that’s the channel only the serious-old of the elders watched. It was just a running reminder how shit the reservation was, how boring, how nothing. And his little brother didn’t even watch normal television much, couldn’t sit still for it, would have been reading comic books if anything.

Instead of shuffling around the wake and standing out at the family plot up behind East Glacier, everybody parked on the logging road behind it so they’d have to come right up to the graves to turn their cars around, Ricky ran away to North Dakota. His plan was Minneapolis—he knew some cats there—but then halfway there the oil crew had been hiring, and said they liked Indians because of their built-in cold resistance. It meant they might not slip off in winter.

Ricky, sitting in the orange doghouse trailer for that interview, had nodded yeah, Blackfeet didn’t care about the cold, and no, he wouldn’t leave them short-handed in the middle of a week. What he didn’t say was that you don’t get cold resistant because your jackets suck, you just stop complaining about it after a while, because complaining doesn’t make you any warmer. He also didn’t say that, first paycheck, he was gone to Minneapolis, bye.

The foreman interviewing him had been thick and wind-burned and sort of blond, with a beard like a brillo pad. When he’d reached across the table to shake Ricky’s hand and look him in the eye while he did it, the modern world had fallen away for a long blink and the two of them were standing in a canvas tent, the foreman in a cavalry jacket, and Ricky already had designs on that jacket’s brass buttons, wasn’t thinking at all of the paper on the table between them that he’d just made his mark on.

This had been happening more and more to him the last few months. Ever since hunting went bad last winter and right up through the interview to now, not even stopping for Cheeto dying on that couch.

Cheeto hadn’t been his born name, but he had freckles and orange hair, so it wasn’t a name he could shake, either.

Ricky wondered how the funeral had gone. He wondered if right now there was a big mulie nosing up to the chickenwire fence around all these dead Indians. He wondered what that big mulie saw, really. If it was just waiting all of these two-leggers out.

Cheeto would have thought it was a pretty deer, Ricky figured. He had never been a kid to get up early with Ricky to be out in the trees when light broke. He hadn’t liked killing anything except beers, probably would have been vegetarian if that was on option on the rez. His orange hair put enough of a bullseye on his back, though. Eating rabbit food would have just got
more dumb Indians lining up to put him down.

But then he’d died on that couch anyway, not even from anybody else, just from himself, at which point Ricky figured he’d get out as well, screw it. Sure, he could be this crew’s chain monkey for a week or two. Yeah, he could sleep four to a doghouse with all these white boys, the wind rocking the trailer. No, he didn’t mind being Chief, though he knew that, had he been around back in the days of raiding and running down buffalo, he’d have been a grunt then as well. Whatever the bow and arrow version of a chain monkey was, that’d be Ricky Boss Ribs’s station.

When he was a kid there’d been a picture book in the library, about Heads-Smashed-In or whatever it was called—the buffalo jump, where the oldtime Blackfeet ran herd after herd off the cliff. Ricky remembered that the boy selected to drape a calf robe over his shoulders and run out in front of all those buffalo, he’d been the one to win all the races the elders had put him and all the other kids in, and he’d been the one to climb all the trees the best, because you needed to be fast to run ahead of all those tons of meat, and you needed good hands to, at the last moment after sailing off the cliff, grab onto the rope the men had already left there, that would tuck you up under, safe.

What had it been like, sitting there while the buffalo flowed down through the air within arm’s reach, bellowing, their legs probably stiff because they didn’t know for sure when the ground was coming?

What had it felt like, bringing meat to the whole tribe.

Jones had a good interview on NPR about the book as well.