The Only Good Indians

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

Why do people like horror as a genre? What purposes might it serve beyond entertainment? What do people take away from the gruesome and the horrific? Can horror ever be considered literary or artistic? Why or why not?

Teaching Suggestion: The questions may be best used as a class discussion to spark interest and then revisited after reading one or more of the sources below.

• This article from Lehigh University provides discussion on recent popular movies in the horror genre and the social anxieties they depict.
• This article from Variety discusses the ways in which horror films directly explore and expose contemporary horrors. (Content Warning: includes discussion of racism, police violence, and systemic oppression)

Short Activity

Though The Only Good Indians is a horror story, much of the conflict stems from the ongoing impacts of colonialization on Indigenous people and occupied lands. Use the provided timeline to choose a topic within the history of colonization that continues to have an impact in the present. Create a short presentation of your topic based on research. Explain your topic factually to your peers and discuss the impacts that continue today.

Teaching Suggestion: As discussion of colonialization may be sensitive, students may benefit from content warnings, reminders of preestablished social and emotional learning (SEL) strategies and difficult discussion protocols, and emphasis that the purpose of the activity is to provide historical context. This activity may be completed in small groups or pairs and then shared with the class. To prevent overlap, consider disallowing repeated topics. Encouraging students to prioritize widespread Federal policies or policies related to the Crow and Blackfeet specifically may lead to more relevant research in the context of the novel.

• This interactive timeline created by Dr. Karen L. Waters and Dr. Danica Brown (both of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) offers an overview of European colonization of what is now the United States.
• Teachers and students may find these guidelines from the University of Michigan useful for facilitating sensitive discussions.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

Consider a set of expectations you feel you must follow. These might come from family, school, religion, or society in the form of popular culture or stereotypes. Write a reflection examining these expectations and exploring your relationship with them. Some avenues for exploration include whether you feel these expectations are fair, how they impact your choices, how they impact your relationships with others, or whether you believe they are possible for you.   

Teaching Suggestion: Due to the potential for sensitive issues to arise, students may benefit from a reminder to choose a topic and reflect only to their comfort level. Directly connecting this prompt to a central question of the novel (e.g., the expectation of being a “good Indian”) may be helpful. Students may benefit from reminders of SEL strategies. Offering, but not requiring, a chance to share or discussing the concept of social expectations in general may build a stronger student connection to the text.