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.