#marvelishmanda

First, the reviewer's bare minimum: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is one of the best books I've read this year. It's Stephen Graham Jones at his most ambitious—a 448-page historical horror novel that uses the vampire as a lens to examine genocide, survival, and the question of who gets to tell Indigenous stories.

It's a stunningly effective horror novel. The kind where you read a scene, close the book, stare at the wall for five minutes processing what just happened, then pick it back up because you're compelled to know what happens next. Jones understands that true horror so often lives in the spaces between what's said and what's implied, and he plays that gap like a virtuoso. The nested narrative structure could've been a gimmick; instead it's a ratchet, tightening with every perspective shift. If you stop reading here, you know enough—five stars, buy it, read it, be devastated.

But what struck me most, what I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I finished it, is how the book is an act of archival sovereignty—both within its narrative structure and as a work itself.

Before I say anything else, I need to be clear about where I'm coming from. I have Stockbridge-Munsee ancestry, but I was raised entirely disconnected from that culture. I'm not an enrolled tribal member. I'm doing my best to learn and connect, but I'm speaking from the outside looking in—someone who desperately wants to understand her people but knows she's setting off on a journey, not arriving at a destination. If I get something wrong here, I welcome correction and discussion. This review is, in part, my continued examination and re-evaluation of my own perspectives—I'm speaking as a student and not a teacher.

Earlier this year, I read Rose Miron's Indigenous Archival Activism: Mohican Interventions in Public History and Memory, which documents the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Historical Committee's decades-long fight to recover and reframe Mohican history. Since 1968, this group—mostly Mohican women—has been collecting and reorganising historical materials to shift who controls how Native history is accessed, represented, written, and preserved. They founded the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum, which now houses the largest collection of Mohican documents and artifacts in the world. For centuries, non-Native actors collected, stole, sequestered, and profited from Native stories and documents. The Historical Committee's work reclaims that authority. They are making themselves the source. (Aside: they are also raising money for a new cultural centre. If you're interested in donating to the effort, contact info can be found here).

What Jones does in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, in many respects, works in parallel ways, and reading these two works in the same year completely shifted how I understand the relationship between fiction and archival activism.

I'm citing Rose Miron's work on Mohican archival activism here because that's what I've read, and thus what's shaped new pathways in my thinking this year. I haven't yet engaged with Blackfeet historians like Rosalyn LaPier or William E. Farr, whose work directly addresses Blackfeet history and the contexts Jones is writing from—but reading this book has made that gap in my knowledge impossible to ignore. I've added to my list, and I welcome suggestions.

The novel is structured as nested archives: in 2012, a professor named Etsy Beaucarne discovers her great-great-great-grandfather's diary hidden in a wall. Arthur Beaucarne was a Lutheran pastor in 1912 Montana, and his diary contains both his own observations and the confessions of a Pikuni man named Good Stab—a being who can't die, who has survived since before the buffalo vanished, who hunts the buffalo hunters to exact a reckoning for a genocide. The structure itself asks questions about whose stories survive and how. Arthur's diary survives because it was preserved in a wall—a white pastor's documentation of Indigenous experience, mediated through colonial institutions, missionary frameworks, and the English language. It's the kind of archive that has always existed and dominated: Indigenous voices filtered through white recorders, being shaped by their assumptions, their translations, and their comforts.

But Jones doesn't let that be the only story. Good Stab's voice breaks through. His sections are Blackfeet-dialected English, peppered with Pikuni terminology and left untranslated. There are no glossaries, no footnotes explaining what words mean or providing cultural context for non-Indigenous readers. Jones has said he writes for Blackfeet readers first, and this is what that looks like on the page—linguistic sovereignty practiced through craft. It's the same principle the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee seems to operate from: Indigenous people control how their stories are told, how they're accessed, and what gets explained. If you don't understand, that's not the storyteller's problem. If you want to understand, you can make the effort to learn.

I've moved to countries where I didn't speak the language twice as an adult, had to learn by immersion and context, so this didn't bother me personally. I picked up what I could, managed with what I couldn't, and trusted the narrative to carry me. I know some readers struggle with this; that's understandable, and I think it's also the point. Jones isn't writing for their comfort. He's creating a Blackfeet-centered archive within the genre of literary horror, and centering Blackfeet people means some readers will be on the outside. That's also what it feels like when your stories are held in institutions that don't serve you, in languages that aren't yours, with context you're not given access to. The discomfort is pedagogical.

The vampire mythology Jones builds is both familiar and unlike anything I've encountered previously. Good Stab must feed on human blood to maintain his form—if he feeds on other animals, his body begins to transform into theirs. This isn't metaphor, it's literal: consume what you hunt or lose yourself. It's the logic of forced assimilation made flesh. "Kill the Indian, save the man" becomes "consume whiteness or cease to exist as Pikuni." Good Stab finds a way to refuse both options.

There's a colonial trope here that could be ugly—Native-on-Native violence that absolves settlers of responsibility. Jones handles this possibility by making the violence a direct result of forced assimilation. Good Stab isn't violent against his own people because he's Indigenous; he's violent because colonialism has engineered a scenario where survival requires feeding on his own people. His violence isn't inherent; it's imposed. He survives by feeding on his own people when necessary, which breeds its own horror—to remain Pikuni, he must consume Pikuni lives. It's an abhorrent choice, and Jones doesn't offer Good Stab easy outs. Good Stab is not noble or tragic in sanitised ways. He's hungry, vicious, and brutal. He also has his agency. He chooses survival, and sometimes survival is grotesque.

The buffalo are everywhere in this book, and if you view them as kin—not as resources, not as symbol, but as revered family—the horror of their extermination lands very differently. The systematic slaughter of the buffalo wasn't just ecological destruction, it was kin-murder on a genocidal scale. It was callously engineered to starve Indigenous peoples into submission. I know many readers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, were devastated by what happens to Weasel Plume—I've seen the Goodreads reviews and Discord discussions, and I know of people who struggled to finish through their tears.

That grief, with its singular source and focus? That's one buffalo. Multiply it by the millions slaughtered for little reason but to starve Blackfeet people, and the awful scale of what was done comes into focus. Good Stab hunts the buffalo hunters because they're killing his family. The supernatural horror is a secondary one. The real horror is that the U.S. government sanctioned the near-extinction of an entire species of animals as a weapon of genocide, and we have receipts. The Marias Massacre (January 1870) is the historical anchor—nearly 200 Blackfeet people, mostly women, children, and elders, murdered by the U.S. Army. Jones doesn't use this as window dressing, obviously. It's the engine of the narrative, the wound Good Stab carries. It's the reason he exists. The book refuses to let us look away from that.

What also struck me is how Jones balances horror with humour. Arthur Beaucarne, despite being the white Lutheran pastor, carries most of the book's lighter moments—from his affected prose and his earnest attempts to understand Good Stab, to his very human flaws. The humour doesn't undercut the horror; it helps to metabolise it. This is something I recognise from other Indigenous writers like Tommy Orange and Cherie Dimaline: humour as a survival mechanism, not an escape. You laugh because otherwise you drown. Arthur's sections often provide tonal reprieve without ever letting the reader forget what's at stake.

The epistolary format exposes the seams in all of it. The transitions between Arthur's journal and Good Stab's confessions jar at times—intentionally. Indigenous history is almost always mediated, fragmented, and reconstructed from incomplete records put down by people who didn't understand what they were documenting and who would often simply change or omit things if it didn't fit their world view. The novel's structure performs a similar fragmentation while simultaneously offering Good Stab's voice as a counter-archive—a record that survives despite the colonial frameworks trying to contain it, like all the stories and histories passed down within Native communities.

And here's where fiction and archival activism converge: Jones isn't just writing about a Blackfeet vampire surviving across centuries. He's practising Indigenous narrative survival through the act of publishing this book. By centering the Marias Massacre in a literary horror novel, he places it in the canon where it can't be as easily ignored. By refusing to translate Pikuni language, he asserts linguistic sovereignty. By giving Good Stab complexity, agency, and hunger, he refuses the "vanished Indian" narrative that still haunts public memory. The book itself becomes another element in the archive—a Blackfeet-centred, Blackfeet-authored intervention in how Indigenous stories are preserved, accessed, and controlled, but also how new ones are created. I know that publication isn't protection, and that this book can still be co-opted, decontextualised, and taught badly, but it exists in the first place on Jones's terms, in his language, and that matters.

This is what the Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee has been doing for fifty years, in many ways. They're reclaiming physical documents, reorganising archives, and ultimately making the Arvid E. Miller Library/Museum and the Mohican people the authoritative source for Mohican history. Jones is doing it through fiction—creating new narratives that centre Indigenous perspectives, languages, and survival, writing those stories into perpetuity within the literary landscape. Both are acts of sovereignty. Refusals of erasure. Insistence that Indigenous people control how their stories are told.

Reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunter after Indigenous Archival Activism made me reconsider what I'm doing with my own writing. I write poetry, I write reviews, I'm working on a novel, and now I've been thinking about how those forms function as archives. What am I preserving? Whose language am I centering? When I write about books by Indigenous authors, am I translating for non-Indigenous readers' comfort, or am I speaking to Indigenous readers first? With what authority am I speaking, and what lack thereof? What would it mean to approach my own work as archival activism—not just recording my experiences with cancer, displacement, and learning to connect with my heritage, but actively shaping what survives, who has access, and what gets explained?

Jones has given me a model for how fiction, great fiction, can do the work of reclamation. You don't have to write nonfiction or history to engage in archival activism. You can create new stories that center your people, refuse translation when translation means dilution, and trust your primary audience to understand. You can ask people on the outside to do their own work to engage if they want to, just like you've had to do in a cultural landscape filled with narratives that don't center those like you. You can use genre fiction—horror, in this case—as a vehicle for historical reckoning. You can make your readers uncomfortable when discomfort is the pedagogical point. And you can do all of this while writing a genuinely gripping, terrifying, occasionally funny vampire novel that works on every level.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is a masterpiece. Horror. Historical fiction. A meditation on survival and accountability and the question of what gets preserved. It's also proof that new works of fiction can function as necessary and important archival records in a people's ongoing story—evidence that storytelling is sovereignty, and that Indigenous writers are creating the records future generations will inherit. On their own terms, in their own languages, with their own people at the center.

I'm still learning. I'm still figuring out what it means to write as someone disconnected from her culture but trying to reconnect. Jones has shown me what's possible when you refuse to let colonial archives have the final word. Good Stab survives because he refuses to die. The Stockbridge-Munsee Historical Committee thrives because they refused to let others define them. And Stephen Graham Jones is writing books that ensure Blackfeet stories endure in forms that can't be stolen, sequestered, or mistranslated.

That's more than horror. That's resistance. That's hope. That's archival activism in both ink and blood, and it's one of the most important books I'll read this year.

We promised to share the weight, so I carried the groceries and the grief.

I took your name, and the calls, and the questions no parent should have to answer.

I delivered our son, and all his updates, into a world that would not keep him.

I held his hand and the line. I held you upright and myself together.

We both gave— hours, hope, and pieces of ourselves. But out? I was never the one allowed to give that.

I swallowed my fear and your sorrow.

You left the dishes in the sink and my trust in the drain.

—

When I left, I did it the way you sleep after too many nights awake— quiet— like a held breath released.

You didn’t stop me. I don’t blame you.

There was nothing left of either of us but silence— gathering like dust.

There was too much of him in the calendar reminders, in the crayon on the wall, in the sound of the microwave at midnight.

I think you stayed because someone had to.

I think I left because someone had to.

author's note: learning Czech as a native English speaker is just kind of like this, sometimes...

We started with coffee and a casual clause. Then you slipped into instrumental— and I never recovered.

You’re the kind of language that undresses slowly— case by case, stripping structure till I’m bare, unsure what I’m allowed to carry.

You’re always just outside my lines. I beg in the present tense— but you only finish in future perfect.

I used to flirt in French— no strings, no syntax. But you expect agreement in every position. And when I get it wrong, you correct me— say I’m only animate when the case demands it.

You said you wanted space— but still required the right tone. I tried to meet you halfway, you scrambled the word order and said it was poetry.

You said you don’t mind taking the lead— but you still insist on second position. And G-d forbid I come before the clitic.

You’re soft consonants with hard limits, and half your meaning’s always implied. Every time I think I’ve cracked your code, you shift the stress mid-word— make me unvoice myself to match you.

I fell for your false friends, got intimate with idioms that meant nothing you said they did. You whispered sweet nothings with a softened ď— then proofread my sigh.

I dream in declension tables, whisper moans in conditional, Wake up misaligned and try not to cry.

But I’m in too deep. I’ve stopped resisting your structure, declined every soft boundary you gave me— and still, I keep hoping you’ll inflect me right.

Content warnings: gun violence, mass shootings, antisemitism. Tonight, when I strike a match in my kitchen and say, lehadlik ner shel Chanukkah— the word for light catches in my throat like a bone.

Blessed are You— You who are praised in every kaddish, great and holy— they say Your name grows each time we say it.

Does it grow tonight by the muzzle-flash, by the blood on the boardwalk?

The sea keeps davening its indifferent psalm, kol Adonai al ha-mayim, voice of the Unending on the waters—

but today the loudest voice was the news anchor mispronouncing Chanukkah over donuts growing stale and plastic dreidels behind police tape.

Half a world away, my heart is pressed between the pages of someone else’s siddur, stained with someone else’s first-night oil.

Half a world away I watch my own candle burn, refusing to believe this is what it means to increase the light.

We ran for the running, chased nothing, won joy. Grass-stained knees Popsicle tongues Palms full of gravel and glory. I was a mom-shaped kid— barefoot, loud, rebecome. And you— you laughed like you’d never stop.

Content Warning: cancer (particularly bone metastases)

It hasn’t killed me yet— but it spreads. From marrow to memory, it seeds the femur, threads the ribs, scrapes its code into the curve of my pelvis— then metastasizes to the contact list.

A slow ghosting: first the bones thin, then the texts. First the flare, then the silence calcifies where contact was.

I want my scans to be clean— not my notifications.

I get my denosumab shot and call it armor. Pretend the creak in my hips is just weather. Not absence. Not another friend backed away from the edges of their discomfort.

I still trace the ridge of my ribs like a list I forgot to update: this one stopped replying on a Tuesday, this one left up our photos but never says my name, this one posted brunch with a caption that reads, ”grateful for my healthy friends”

You are not a burden.

You are tired— not broken.

You are in need— not too much.

You are still here— That is triumph.

Lick the slip of it—peach-slick, spun. Let plump pulse press on soft lip. Murmur the vowel: round, ripe, low. Teeth tease juice from golden syllable skin. This line swells thick with sugar-sound. Melt it slow in your mouth’s heat. Gloss drips down through glottal grit. Sweetness spills in secret sibilants. You buzz, half-full of honey. Swallow. Your tongue wants more.