The Indigenous Final Girl in Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians

Abstract:Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians features what might be the first Indigenous final girl in slasher fiction and cinema. The final girl, and the slasher genre as a whole, has received a tremendous amount of criticism over the years, with the scholar who coined the term "final girl," Carol J. Clover, suggesting that the character is a masculine surrogate whose narrative agency occurs through inflicting phallic violence. What makes Jones's novel striking is how its final girl, Denorah Cross Guns, does not find recourse in violence, but instead survives the novel's slasher, Elk Head Woman, by refusing to inflict harm and through her skills at basketball. Moreover, the novel as a whole represents a sustained attempt to critique Indigenous masculinity for the harm it can inflict on women and, in this way, challenges the misogyny that the slasher genre has been justifiably criticized for.