CHARACTER
The Only Good Indiansby Stephen Graham Jones

Denorah Cross Guns

Denorah Cross Guns

Quick Facts

Who They Are

Bold, fast, and razor-focused, Denorah Cross Guns is a born competitor whose court becomes a battleground for history. She’s the daughter who got her father’s smile and fire but not his mistakes—and the teenager forced to finish an old fight she never started. The novel reframes her athletic excellence as a form of cultural endurance: a modern expression of belonging and responsibility. When violence comes hunting, Denorah doesn’t “win” by outmuscling it; she changes the terms of victory, translating skill and grit into mercy that restores balance.

She’s not drawn in lavish physical detail; instead, the book highlights her presence—long hair she braids for games and later lets loose as camouflage, legs trained by suicides and drills, eyes that read the floor and the land. Her body is her instrument; her choices make her a protector.

Personality & Traits

Denorah’s personality is the engine of her survival. Competitive and disciplined, she reads people and situations like defensive sets. Crucially, her toughness is ethical, not just physical: she refuses to inherit a script of retaliation and instead reframes power as care.

  • Driven competitor: Nicknamed her dad’s “Finals Girl,” she treats every possession like it matters—scholarship dreams, tribal pride, and family expectations all braided into her training.
  • Resilient under pressure: The chase across ice and sage becomes a brutal road game; she manages pace, breath, and terrain the way she manages tempo on the court.
  • Perceptive and tactical: She spots weaknesses—Shaney’s uncanny footwork, the lines of sight for a hunter’s rifle—and adjusts on the fly.
  • Modern tradition-bearer: Basketball is her warpath; pregame braids and, later, letting her hair down to blend with the landscape show how contemporary skill and inherited teachings coexist.
  • Empathetic courage: In the boneyard, she recognizes the Elk Head Woman’s grief and shields the reborn calf, choosing mercy over revenge even after witnessing devastation.

Character Journey

Denorah begins as a local legend whose life is bounded by grades, drills, and the next tipoff. The supernatural erupts into her lane through a deceptively ordinary pickup game, and her world widens from gym lights to winter stars. After the sweat lodge turns into a slaughterhouse, she runs—first to survive, then to understand. The reservation becomes her court: fences as screens, snow-choked draws as passing lanes, the elk boneyard as a scoreboard of the past.

Her arc culminates not in domination but translation. She reads the opponent’s story as well as her own: a mother’s grief animating a monstrous hunt. When she steps between a rifle and a newborn, she atones for a debt she didn’t incur, converting athletic bravery into moral authority. Denorah doesn’t break the curse by defeating it; she ends it by refusing its rules.

Key Relationships

  • Gabriel Cross Guns: With her father, affection and frustration coexist. She inherited his competitive fire and smile, but she also carries the cost of his choices. Her final act—protecting the calf—reclaims their bond from his past, transforming a legacy of harm into an offering of repair.

  • Elk Head Woman / Shaney Holds: The pickup game is their opening ritual: skill against skill, predator testing prey. Their final meeting is stranger and more intimate—two forms of motherhood and daughterhood intersecting. Denorah’s recognition of the Elk Head Woman’s grief turns a fight scene into a scene of understanding.

  • Denny Pease: As stepfather and game warden, Denny represents stability and the law. He races to save Denorah, then becomes the last, necessary obstacle she must face; by stopping his shot, she asserts a higher law—mercy over vengeance—and claims adulthood in front of him.

  • Nathan Yellow Tail: A classmate drawn into horror, Nathan’s survival and quick thinking bring help. His presence widens the circle of witness beyond Denorah’s family, underscoring that community—not just individual heroism—matters to the story’s resolution.

Defining Moments

Denorah’s story is a relay of trials that turn athletic discipline into moral leadership.

  • The one-on-one game with Shaney

    • What happens: Denorah trades buckets and mind-games with a stranger whose moves feel uncanny.
    • Why it matters: It foreshadows the hunt—testing stamina, angles, and will—and proves Denorah’s poise when her opponent doesn’t play by human rules.

  • The sweat lodge aftermath

    • What happens: She stumbles onto the bloody result of the Elk Head Woman’s revenge against her father and Cassidy Sees Elk.
    • Why it matters: Innocence ends; the stakes become personal and communal, and survival shifts from athletic metaphor to necessity.

  • The chase across the reservation

    • What happens: Denorah uses conditioning, local knowledge, and improvisation to stay alive—reading snow, fences, and wind like a playbook.
    • Why it matters: It translates her court sense into land sense, proving her resilience is both physical and strategic.

  • The elk boneyard

    • What happens: She confronts the remains of the Thanksgiving Classic slaughter and witnesses the rebirth of a calf.
    • Why it matters: The past becomes visible; recognition of loss opens a path away from retaliation and toward repair.

  • The final stand

    • What happens: She steps between Denny Pease’s rifle and the Elk Head Woman shielding her newborn.
    • Why it matters: Her “No, Dad! No!” halts the ritual of payback, enacting atonement on behalf of Gabriel Cross Guns and ending the cycle.

Essential Quotes

“Denorah’s like that,” Gabe whispers, like the best secret ever. “Just, better, man. Serious. Browning’s never seen nothing like her.”

This pride frames Denorah as both daughter and phenomenon. The boast is more than local hype: it marks the burden of expectation and the inheritance of belief she later redeems, transforming her father’s braggadocio into a legacy of protection.

This win isn’t just for pride, Denorah tells herself, in order to push harder, be faster, jump higher. It’s for her tribe, her people, it’s for every Blackfeet from before, and after.

Here, competition becomes stewardship. The court is a cultural stage, and Denorah’s drive folds personal ambition into communal history—foreshadowing how her “win” will become an act of care, not conquest.

...what the Girl does here, for Po’noka but also for her whole tribe, what she does is slide forward on her bloody knees, placing her small body between that rifle and the elk that killed her dad. She holds her right hand up the slope, palm out, fingers spread—the old man demonstrates—and she says it clear in that cold air: No, Dad! No!

The novel slows time to honor agency. By naming her action as “for Po’noka” and for her tribe, the narration elevates her choice from survival instinct to ceremonial gesture—Denorah repurposes her body, once trained to score, into a shield that restores balance.

It’s not the end of the trail, the headlines will all say, it never was the end of the trail. It’s the beginning.

The closing refrain recasts a familiar American epitaph into a promise. Denorah’s mercy doesn’t erase harm; it reopens the future, insisting that Indigenous stories end not in vanishing but in renewal.