‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’: Vampires, Colonial Violence, and Who Gets to Tell the Story

Horror has long functioned as a genre preoccupied with justice. It stages the return of the repressed, giving narrative form to violence and vengeance. In contemporary Indigenous fiction, this impulse toward historical reckoning acquires particular urgency, as horror becomes a means of confronting histories that settler narratives have obscured or denied. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) by Stephen Graham Jones participates in this tradition by mobilizing genre as a formal strategy for reckoning with the enduring structures of settler colonialism. Through its reworking of vampire mythology and its layered, epistolary narrative design, the novel uses popular genre conventions to expose historical violence and assert Indigenous presence within literary and historical archives that have systematically erased it.

Situated within the growing field of Indigenous horror and twenty-first century American fiction, the novel emerges from a cultural moment increasingly attentive to the unfinished nature of colonial histories. This context is crucial to how the novel registers its commitment to social justice: It returns to the nineteenth-century destruction of the buffalo and the dismantling of Indigenous lifeways—events inseparable from US expansionist policy and military strategy. Rather than treating this violence as a closed historical episode, however, the narrative frames it as structurally continuous with the present, insisting that colonialism operates not as a past tragedy but as an ongoing condition.  

This essay argues that The Buffalo Hunter Hunter enacts its commitment to social justice through two interdependent formal strategies: revised vampire mechanics that recast monstrosity through extractive colonial relations, and a nested epistolary structure that interrogates archival authority and the mediation of Indigenous testimony. Form and content operate inseparably: The novel’s fragmented narration and temporal instability make the persistence of colonial violence formally legible. In doing so, the text demonstrates how genre fiction can function as an ethical and political intervention, using the aesthetics of horror to make visible what dominant historical narratives have sought to render invisible.

The Marias Massacre and the Destruction of the Buffalo

The novel’s commitment to social justice begins with the historical realities it invokes, most notably the Marias Massacre, an attack by the US Army on a Piegan Blackfeet camp in 1870 led by Eugene Baker—justified through rhetoric that framed Indigenous people as inherently barbaric, a discourse that enabled and normalized mass killing. As Rodger C. Henderson notes, “With regard to Baker’s Piegan expedition, Montana settlers and the military claimed that Indians’ state of ‘barbarism’ justified the massacre as a means of subjugation” (51), a formulation in which language functions as ideological machinery, converting genocide into a deemed necessity. 

This logic extended beyond direct military violence into ecological warfare, most notably through the mass slaughter of the buffalo. US military and settler strategies explicitly encouraged the destruction of buffalo herds as a means of undermining Plains tribes’ economy and culture. The eradication of the buffalo was a calculated tactic to produce Indigenous starvation and displacement. Patrick Wolfe’s formulation of settler colonialism is crucial here. He argues, “The logic of this project, a sustained intuitional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distant—invasion is a structure not an event” (Wolfe 2). By framing settler colonialism as a structure rather than a discrete historical event, Wolfe enables us to see how these practices—massacres, ecological devastation, forced starvation—are interconnected expressions of a deep desire for Indigenous people to be entirely eradicated.

Jones’s novel directly registers this convergence of military and ecological violence. A key moment articulates this strategy from an Indigenous perspective when the novel’s protagonist, Good Stab, returns to his camp momentarily after years of wandering the Plains of Montana alone. “This is how I learned the Pikuni were starving, that the buffalo had been shot out, the Nittowsinan was getting smaller and smaller that soon it would be so small we would fall off the edge of it, into America” (Jones 331). The imagery of the shrinking Nittowsinan, meaning “our land” in the Pikuni language, encapsulates both territorial dispossession and epistemic reordering; land is not just stolen but redefined within a colonial framework that renders Indigenous presence illegible. 

Who Controls Good Stab’s Story?

One of the most striking ways the novel registers its commitment to social justice is through its formal construction: an epistolary, nested narrative that layers multiple voices and degrees of reliability. When Esty discovers Arthur’s journal—filled with Good Stab’s recorded “confessions”—the reader is positioned within a chain of mediation that destabilizes any singular claim to truth. Arthur explicitly frames his act of recording as both preservation and authority: “I only hope to record Good Stab’s tale, as I feel it my duty as an American to attempt to capture these last exhalations of a people who won’t be seen again in the world” (Jones 92). This statement reveals the ideological violence embedded within the archive itself. Arthur assumes both the disappearance of Indigenous people and his own right to document them, enacting precisely the logic of settler colonialism that the novel critiques.

Good Stab’s testimony, therefore, never reaches the reader unmediated. It is filtered through Arthur’s authorship, a dynamic that foregrounds the historical reality that Indigenous voices have often been preserved only within settler-controlled forms. This mediation aligns with Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s argument that “literature has shown that archives have the capacity to produce and to reproduce social justice and injustice through their constructions of the past, engagements in the present, and shaping of possible futures” (26). The journal operates precisely in this ambivalent space: It preserves Good Stab’s voice while simultaneously reinscribing the structures that marginalize it. Even Arthur’s later insistence “I listen with my heart on the ground as you want it, Good Stab” (Jones 314), suggests a desire for ethical witnessing, yet it is undercut by the reader’s knowledge that Arthur himself was complicit in the violence inflicted upon the Pikuni. His claim to listen “properly” exposes the limits of settler empathy when it is not accompanied by accountability.

Related reading: Indigenous voices and institutional denial in The Last Wave (1977)

The novel’s layered structure also reflects the fragmented nature of traumatic testimony. As Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue, “trauma returns in disjointed fragments in the memory of the survivor, the listener has to let these trauma fragments make their impact both on him and on the witness” (80). This insight is formally realized in the text’s disjointed narration, where Good Stab’s story emerges unevenly, mediated through Arthur and later interpreted by Esty. The reader, like Arthur, is positioned as a listener who must piece together meaning from partial, unstable accounts. In this way, the novel transforms its audience into participants in the act of witnessing, rather than passive consumers of a coherent historical narrative.

At the same time, the nested narrative mirrors the structure of settler historiography: fragmented, mediated, and incomplete. The interplay between Good Stab and Arthur—described in one review as “Two personalities, two very different people, two different races, and stories, and cultures, and lives” (Iglesias)—highlights the irreconcilable differences embedded within the text’s narrative voices. Rather than synthesizing these perspectives into a unified account, the novel preserves their tension, refusing the coherence that traditional historical narratives often impose. Crucially, the novel also enacts a formal refusal of closure. Esty’s decision in the present day to destroy the journal, “I was so sure of it, of the rightness of it, the unavoidable goodness of it” (Jones 429), appears, at first glance, to resolve the ethical dilemma of the archive. However, this act does not restore justice or fully liberate Good Stab’s story; instead, it underscores the impossibility of adequately containing or resolving colonial violence within narrative form. The destruction of the journal interrupts the settler-controlled archival chain, but it also eliminates Good Stab’s testimony,  raising further questions about preservation and responsibility.

This resistance to closure aligns with the conventions of horror, a genre that often denies neat resolution in favor of lingering unease. As Noël Carroll suggests, “Talking about the monster when it is not present primes the audience’s reaction for those scenes where we see or read about the monster in action” (99). Jones exploits this dynamic through the gradual revelation of Good Stab’s condition, using narrative delay and fragmentation to heighten both emotional and ethical engagement. Yet the novel also reconfigures horror’s traditional “monster”: rather than positioning monstrosity as external, it locates it within the structures of settler colonial violence itself.

The form of the novel enacts what its content argues. The layered, mediated narrative insists that history is not fixed or complete, but ongoing and contested. By refusing narrative closure and exposing the instability of the archive, the text becomes a site of resistance to erasure—one that compels its readers to confront both the persistence of colonial violence and their own role as witnesses to it.

Vampirism as Colonial Violence

Jones reconfigures vampirism to make colonial violence both structurally enduring and intimately embodied. The figure of Good Stab makes the recursive, parasitic logic of settler colonialism materially visible. By reshaping the rules of the vampire, Jones mobilizes genre itself as a site of social justice intervention.

Good Stab’s vampirism is crucially distinct from Euro-American gothic conventions. Unlike the aristocratic vampire of Dracula, whose predation is frequently externalized and tied to anxieties about invasion, Good Stab’s transformation is explicitly located within colonial encounter. His becoming a vampire is not accidental or folkloric, but causally linked to settler expansion: As he reflects, the being who turns him originates “from where all the Napikwan were. If they’d never started coming over, then he never would have either” (Jones 351). Vampirism is thus inseparable from colonial incursion; it is produced by it. This causal logic reorients the vampire away from a generic Gothic figure into a historically specific embodiment of colonial violence.

This shift aligns with, while also critically extending, the tradition of vampire criticism. As Nina Auerbach argues in Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), vampires “matter because when properly understood, they make us see that our lives are implicated in theirs and our times are inescapable” (15). Jones intensifies this insight by embedding that implication within a settler colonial framework: The vampire forces a confrontation with the ongoing structures that sustain it. Good Stab’s declaration “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had” (Jones 170) makes this explicit, positioning him as the return of a repressed history.

Related reading: Vampires & the Stigma of Mental Illness in The Transfiguration (2016) and Martin (1978)

Formally, Jones alters vampire mechanics in ways that directly support this intervention. Good Stab’s hunger is tragically directed; he is compelled to feed on Indigenous people to maintain his own Pikuni identity, as drinking anything else will eventually lead to a physical transformation into another being—whether it be a deer or a white man. He confesses: “I’m the one who has to drink the blood of his people, just so I can keep drinking that blood” (Jones 169). This repetition enacts the entrapment it describes, mirroring a cycle that cannot be broken. Good Stab’s forced consumption of Indigenous bodies appears, at first glance, to reproduce colonial fantasies of Indigenous savagery; yet the novel systematically overturns this framing by revealing that this violence is imposed. Michael Taussig’s argument in Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man clarifies this inversion: cannibalism “summed up all that was perceived as grotesquely different about the Indian as well as providing for the colonists the allegory of colonization itself” (105). Jones’s reworking of vampirism operates within precisely this logic—his hunger is the product of colonial encounter. In this sense, vampirism becomes a gothic extension of the cannibal figure Taussig identifies: a projection that ultimately exposes the extractive and consumptive logic of colonialism itself.

Related reading: Vampirism, cultural appropriation, and ancestral memory in Sinners (2025)

Crucially, Jones refuses any possibility of containing or resolving this monstrosity. Good Stab cannot simply be exorcised; his condition cannot be neatly separated from the world that produced it. Rather than isolating the vampire as an aberration, the novel insists that his condition remains embedded in colonial structures. The violence he enacts cannot be externalized and purged because it is constitutive of the system itself, circulating through history in ways that resist closure. This is further underscored through the figure of the Cat Man, whose confession: “I’ve destroyed villages, towns, cities. There are whole peoples forgotten to history because of me” (Jones 354) scales vampirism up to the level of civilizational erasure. Here, the vampire becomes a figure of genocide and historical disappearance. The emphasis on “peoples forgotten to history” foregrounds the epistemic violence through which colonialism not only destroys but erases, producing absence as both material and narrative fact. Vampirism, in this sense, becomes a mechanism for making that absence visible, forcing recognition of what dominant histories have sought to disappear.

At the same time, the novel engages with and inverts the dynamics identified by Stephen D. Arata in his analysis of Dracula. Arata argues that the figure of the vampire reflects imperial anxiety, whereby “British culture sees its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms” (620). Jones extends this logic but relocates its perspective. Rather than staging a fantasy of “reverse colonization,” the novel presents monstrosity as already embedded within colonial expansion itself. The horror is not that the Other might invade, but that invasion has already occurred—and continues to occur. Good Stab’s existence is the afterlife of that invasion, a living testament to its consequences.

This continuity reshapes the novel’s moral framework, particularly against Western genre expectations that marginalize Indigenous presence and naturalize settler violence. The novel complicates and inverts monstrosity: Good Stab commits horrific acts, but the text redirects attention to the system that produces them. The vampire becomes a diagnostic figure, exposing violence long rendered invisible. Like vampirism, settler colonialism relies on extraction and erasure, and by rendering these processes as monstrous, Jones forces their recognition. Good Stab’s body—defined by hunger and contradiction—archives this violence, resisting resolution. This refusal transforms genre into critique, insisting on the persistence of colonial harm.

Indigenous Survival and the Refusal of Closure

The social justice force of the novel lies in its insistence that settler colonial violence is not confined to the past but persists into the present. This is articulated explicitly through Good Stab’s assertion that “Pikuni still fight even when the fight’s over. That’s why your Great Father still hasn’t been able to stamp us all out like he wants, no matter how many soldiers he sends” (Jones 43). This statement collapses any clear boundary between historical conflict and contemporary resistance. Read in the light of the Marias Massacre—which the novel revisits not as closed history but an ongoing structure—the phrasing becomes especially charged: The fight is never truly over, because the structures that necessitate it remain intact. In this sense, the novel mirrors Glen Sean Coulthard’s definition of settler colonialism as “an ongoing practice of dispossession that never ceases to structure capitalist and colonial social relations in the present. Settler colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity” (152). Together, these perspectives position colonialism as a continuous system rather than a completed historical event.

At the same time, the novel depicts persistence not only as suffering, but also as resistance. Good Stab’s insistence on continued struggle resonates with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s call for resurgent organizing, that produces “a future generation that never has to ask how to live free, because they’ve never known anything else—a generation that does not know shame, because they are embedded in each other’s light” (189). Here, survival is the active creation of Indigenous presence and continuity. Within this framework, the vampire figure becomes especially significant. Rather than offering resolution or closure, it embodies a form of persistence that unsettles settler comfort, refusing the possibility that colonial violence can be contained or reconciled. Like the structures that Coulthard describes and the resurgence Simpson imagines, it insists on endurance—on the impossibility of erasure. In doing so, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter asserts that the past remains unsolved, and that the demands for justice continue into the present.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter ultimately enacts its commitment to social justice not only through what it represents, but how it tells its story. By drawing on the historical reality of the Marias Massacre, the novel grounds its narrative in a specific instance of settler colonial violence, refusing the abstraction or distancing that often characterizes dominant historical accounts. Yet it is through its formal innovations—the reworking of vampirism and the fragmented, epistolary structure—that the text most powerfully intervenes in questions of justice and representation. In transforming horror conventions into a vehicle for Indigenous storytelling, Jones critiques the past but also addresses the present, insisting on the continued urgency of Indigenous rights and recognition. Through this, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter thematically and politically works against erasure and demands that its readers confront the enduring realities of colonial injustice.

• Works Cited

  Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621-45. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3827794. 

  Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. U of Chicago P, 1995. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northumbria/detail.action?docID=3038667.

  Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 2003. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203361894.

  Caswell, Michelle, and Marika Cifor. “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives.” Archivaria, no. 81, spring 2016, pp. 23–43. eScholarship, escholarship.org/uc/item/0mb9568h.

  Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. U of Minnesota P, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northumbria/detail.action?docID=1793913.

  Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Routledge, 1991. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northumbria/detail.action?docID=1486841.

  Henderson, Rodger C. “The Piikuni and the U.S. Army’s Piegan Expedition: Competing Narratives of the 1870 Massacre on the Marias River.” Montana The Magazine of Western History, vol. 68, no. 1, spring 2018, pp. 48+. mhs.mt.gov/education/IEFA/HendersonMMWHSpr2018.pdf.

  Iglesias, Gabino. “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Is Stephen Graham Jones’ Horror Masterpiece.” NPR, 17 Mar. 2025, www.npr.org/2025/03/17/nx-s1-5330583/buffalo-hunter-hunter-review-stephen-graham-jones-horror. 

  Jones, Stephen Graham. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Titan Books, 2025.

  Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. U of Minnesota P, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northumbria/detail.action?docID=5047206.

  Taussig, Michael T. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. U of Chicago P, 1986, hdl.handle.net/2027/heb03601.0001.001.

  Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics of an Ethnographic Event. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/northumbria/detail.action?docID=472799.

Article by Alaska Hallsworth

Alaska Hallsworth is an English Literature student pursuing her MA, specialising in Gothic symbolism in the work of the Brontë sisters. She has a deep devotion to vampire and werewolf literature, finds The Blair Witch Project to be a great source of comfort, lives in the UK with a lovely husband, and has two horrible cats.

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