Indian Killer

Many of the book’s characters are filled with rage, particularly at white people. As a child, John is angry about the way he is treated by white society and about what he perceives to be white society’s robbing him of the life he should have had. He learns to suppress this anger in order to avoid appearing hostile and alienating himself further. However, it eats him up inside, adding to his unstable mental health and driving him towards vengeance. Reggie is similarly driven by anger at how he individually, and how Indians more generally, have been treated. Like John, he seeks an outlet for this in violence and, again like John, targets scapegoats, beating up a random white man as punishment for white crimes. In many ways, Aaron’s anger at all Indians for his brother’s murder (although it was actually a pair of white men who killed David) mirrors Reggie’s retaliatory violence: It targets scapegoats and quickly escalates to such a degree that he alienates his friends just as Reggie does. Stirred up by the hate speech of figures like Truck Shultz, this violence quickly escalates into a cycle of vengeance that largely only hurts vulnerable people not directly connected to the crimes.

Marie appears to be primarily outside of this cycle of retaliatory violence. Marie is angry much of the time, both at specific actions such as Mather’s arrogant assumption that he is entitled to talk about Indian culture as an expert and at a more generalized history of oppression and violence against Indians. However, she does not attempt to seek release through violence. Instead, she organizes protests against specific targets and hands out food to homeless Indians. That is to say, she remains outside the cycle of vengeance and violence by accepting her rage and channeling it into attempts to change things. Nevertheless, even she remains at best ambivalent about the Indian Killer’s violence, believing that white people have brought it on themselves. 

Many of the white characters in the novel present particular stereotypes of Indians. Some of these are overtly racist, such as suggestions that all Indians are lazy, violent, or alcoholic. Other racist attitudes are less simplistic, including white-supremacist retellings of American history in which European colonizers are presented as attempting to save Indians from themselves. This is particularly prominent in Bird’s violent testing of Reggie’s knowledge of colonial history and in Truck’s assertion that Indians murdered missionaries because they were bitter and jealous about Europeans’ superiority.

There are also more insidious versions of this pattern of white people defining Indian identity. Mather, for example, is a white man and a self-proclaimed expert on Indians who feels entitled to define what it means to be Indian. He has a patronizingly positive vision of Indians that is static and historical: Focusing on an image of a “golden age” of Indian culture that was largely fabricated by white observers, he is unable to recognize that Indian cultures are alive and changing. When Marie challenges him about his assumed right to teach about Indian culture, he dismisses her as not acting like “a true Spokane” (135), and he later complains that she is “So individualistic. Not tribal at all” (393). In fact, so strong is Mather’s belief that he is entitled and qualified to define Indian identity, he even believes that he could teach Marie and Reggie “a thing or two about being Indian if they would listen to him” (135).

Wilson goes one step further by actually claiming an Indian identity, based only on a vague rumor of a long-lost Indian relative and despite having no connection to any Indian tribes or communities. Like Mather, he has an idealized view of Indians as “noble savages”—inherently spiritual, wise, dignified, and virtuous—attributes he assigns to the fictional hero of his novels, Aristotle Little Hawk. Also like Mather, Wilson believes he can be an expert on Indian identity despite his dubious claim to Indian heritage and his complete lack of lived experience of Indian culture and society. In fact, as his own instability becomes more pronounced, Wilson comes to believe that he has been “chosen for a special task” to write the book that will “finally reveal to the world what it truly meant to be Indian” (338).