Review: “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”
A novel of Native American suffering and revenge under Manifest Destiny in Montana is Stephen Graham Jones’s best work yet
Like most of my generation, I grew up with few true examples of Native Americans. There were the “Indians” who played the bad guys in western movies and playground roughhousing. Then there was the Indian chief who regularly shed a tear during TV commercial breaks over the garbage Americans were tossing out the windows of their cars. And there were the handful of nice, acquiescent, and historically distorted Indians like Pocahontas, Sacagawea, or the tribe that broke bread with the Pilgrims and ushered in Thanksgiving.
I assume the Indians who helped the Pilgrims survive a harsh northeastern winter would like a do-over on that one.
Grappling with one of America’s two original sins (the other being slavery) was not a part of my elementary or secondary education. The only reason I knew anything about the Trail of Tears — President Andrew Jackson’s genocidal forced relocation of the Cherokee from their native lands — was because my mother decided to go college in her late twenties and wrot…
