Indian Killer

Wilson sits in The Last Precinct, a cop bar filled with drunken men. He understands why so many police officers drink to excess but only drinks milk himself, wishing to maintain control. One of the officers at his table grows angry when he learns that Wilson is writing about the Indian Killer and talking to Indians about the murders, fearing that he is interfering in the investigation. He declares that he hates Indians because “[t]hey’re fucking drunks and welfare cheats. They ain’t got no jobs. They’re lazy as shit” (240). In his anger, he also lets slip that the Indian Killer leaves owl feathers at the scene of the crime, something Wilson did not know. He wants to fight Wilson, but the writer leaves the bar.

In his truck, Wilson thinks about how people don’t care about Indians being murdered but are outraged at the idea of an Indian killing white people. He considers the owl as a symbol of death and thinks how much he likes owls, which often feature in his dreams, including a recurring dream in which an owl causes a car crash that kills his birth parents. He turns on the radio and listens to Truck Shultz proposing that “we sterilize any girl whose I.Q. is below one hundred” because that way, “Dumb girls will not give birth to dumb babies. Evil girls will not give birth to evil babies. Indian women will not give birth to Indian Killers” (243).

Mather, his head bandaged, lectures his class, claiming that the Indian Killer is both a revolutionary figure and an inevitable result of a capitalist society that creates a disenfranchised underclass and arguing that, in kidnapping Mark Jones, the killer reflects the way colonization metaphorically stolen Indian children. He also suggests that “The Indian Killer and [Wilson’s Aristotle] Little Hawk are twentieth-century manifestations of the classic Indian warrior” (246), one wild and the other civilized.

Marie angrily decries this idea and again questions Mather’s authority to talk on Indian subjects and his lack of lived experience. She questions whether the Indian Killer is actually Indian and the assumption that the killer is a man, suggesting that she or Mather could easily be the killer. Mather anxiously laughs this off, denying being a murderer, and Marie accuses him of being scared of her because she does not meet his idealized, static vision of the historical Indian. Mather sends her from the classroom, saying that she should quit the course. Before she leaves, Marie declares that the murders are not being committed by an Indian man.

John thinks of how Indians were once afraid of the darkness but discovered fire, which allowed them to keep the darkness and its predators at bay. However, the fire began to rebel, burning them and refusing to be tamed before growing into “candles, then lamps, then cities of lamps” (250). He perceives white people as flames that took the shape of Indians and proceeded to destroy and recreate everything to suit their own needs and wants.

John sees three of these flames surrounding a blind, homeless Indian woman, taunting and threatening her. He drives them off, and the old woman is grateful. She explains that she is a Duwamish Indian and claims that it is not she who is homeless, because Seattle stands on Duwamish lands, but the white people who are far from Europe. She takes out a small paring knife and gives it to John as a gift to a guest on Duwamish land. As she does so, she says that, despite the Indians’ kindnesses, the white colonizers killed them, and now it is time for revenge. She claims to have a time machine that John can use to go back in time to kill Columbus. She goes to show him the time machine but reveals only an empty hand. When John looks at her empty hand and at the knife, he understands what she is saying.

Reggie and his friends have captured a young white man who was camping on the Indian Heritage High School playing fields. Harley and Ty hold his arms behind his back while Reggie interrogates him, recording the whole thing on a tape recorder. He quizzes the white man on colonial history, highlighting the many times white people betrayed, abused, and murdered Indians, and holding the white man accountable. Reggie beats him regularly when he fails to give an answer that pleases him.

After Reggie knocks the white man unconscious, Ty and Harley are keen to leave, but Reggie shakes him awake again and continues asking questions. He accuses him of being Truck Schultz, and when the man denies it, he says that all white people look alike, falsely apologizing and explaining that “we were looking for a white-trash asshole named Truck Schultz but it looks like we got ourselves a whole different white-trash asshole” (259). He says that they will let the man go but then violently digs his thumbs into his eyes. The white man loses conscious from the pain. When Ty asks Reggie what he did, Reggie is surprised by the question and explains simply, “I took his eyes” (259).