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The Inconvenient Indian is at once a 'history' and the complete subversion of a history-in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be 'Indian' in North America. Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope -- a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.… (more)
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This history includes perspectives from both American and Canadian tribes, and learning more about the native peoples of Canada was very refreshing. We so often hear the plight of Native Americans that we forget about those who were living elsewhere on the continent. The only thing that this book lacks is adequate source documentation or footnotes for his information. King gladly states that he isn’t out to write a scholarly or complete history, but a few citations wouldn’t hurt his cause. A pleasant but slightly biased read.
Whereas I'm not a big non fiction reader, I devoured these pages in just a few days, captivated by King's colourful language, sarcasm, wide ranging examples and descriptive themes. He made me think. Think about what it means to be an American Indian without a land, schools or any 'natural' rights. Think about the effects of decades of abuse, repression and silence. But also think about what sovereignty might look like, especially in a global economy and geopolitical framework.
And this is where I believe King's book fails - whereas his protests are valid (although he also conveniently forgets some of the more important contributions from Whites like alphabetization), his vision of the future, in my opinion, remains stale. Stuck in European imperialism, which as world events show us is on the way out, he does not propose a convincing solution to ensure prosperity and cultural independence of a group of people who, according to him, can be divided into some 500+ tribes, each with their customs, languages and forms of governance. In a world where globally, humans are more and more tied and interdependent, there must be a better way to preserve the heritage of their forefathers and integrate the lessons of people who lived off the land.
This, hopefully, will be subject of his next book.
Thomas King has proven his storytelling craft in many titles, including a Massey Lecture series, but this book spells out native history from various POV or at least lens. Without whining he skillfully retells an argument that racial
There is no whitewashing of anything here, and King (himself a native American) gives an appropriate critical assessment of the way whites have treated natives, and also a critical assessment of how natives are using the opportunities that have been made available to them.
The entire discussion is presented in a homey fashion that avoids the dryness of a straight-forward history - it is more like having a conversation with a good friend.
King gives a history of all things
The history of Natives and the film industry is amazing, and film buffs with even a minimum of Native American interest would do well to read it -- it's the first part of the book so impossible to miss. It's a history unknown to most non-Natives (maybe to Natives too) and is important to understanding the 'image' of Indians that's been built in this country. One of the interesting bits is about Will Rogers who, by the 1930s, was the highest-grossing, highest-paid actor in Hollywood. And although he was Indian, he never played an Indian role -- Hollywood didn't think he looked Indian enough. Most of us remember Rogers as a good-natured social commentator; King more correctly characterizes him as a man of "honesty and intelligence, along with a wit that was so sharp and gentle he could cut and heal you with the same stroke." That description fits King's writing style as much as it fits Rogers' wit, and by the end of this book I was always trying to anticipate (but always missing) how King would gently but incisively undercut a point he had been building to. His approach lets you know that he knows he doesn't have all the answers, and he'll appreciate it if you do catch the knife-sharp edges of his comments but he'll gently laugh at you if you miss them. It's the kind of humor that you catch a beat later, and then you end up laughing at yourself along with him.
The history of treaties, up through the present day, is essential to understanding how Native Americans perceive the rest of the inhabitants of this country. The perspective and the the insights are something I can't really convey in a review; I do know I needed this book. It showed me more about myself, and my country, than I counted on. I think I need to read it again....
Thomas King presents the history of native and white interactions in North America from the first but this is not a dry, dull history text. Instead King brings his humour and satire to bear on the subject so that I snorted with laughter often while I was reading it. Of course, at other times I tsked and shook my head at the things I read.
King says that it took him 6 years to write this book "and probably most of [his] lifetime for the rest of the stuff." (quoted from an interview with Shelagh Rogers on The Next Chapter) He is uniquely qualified to discuss this subject. He lives in Guelph Ontario now but he grew up in California and studied in Utah. He is a Cherokee and he counts people from many other tribes among his friends. He has travelled widely in North America (and outside of it; he tried to become a citizen of New Zealand when he was young).
If you want to distill all relations between natives and non-natives down to one thing King says that one thing would be land. He posits that non-natives view land as a commodity but natives have a spiritual connection to the land. That has made natives defenders of ecosystems but it frustrates whites who want to use the land for material wealth. King is scathing about the Tar Sands development and I can't say I blame him. That sort of rape and pillage of the land will shock future generations (if there are future generations).
I will be interested to see how this book fares in the Canada Reads competition. Even if it doesn't win I hope it will get enough publicity to make Canadians think about our future with "Inconvenient Indians".
What all these stories have in common is the devastating consequences that can result from removing indigenous people from their land. If nothing else, King says he would like people to understand the critical role that land plays in aboriginal culture.
King’s writing style makes it feel more like he is telling you a personal story – complete with considerable wit and with his partner Helen pitching in from time to time. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the history of our country’s relationship with aboriginal people. It is a finalist in the 2015 CBC Canada Reads “One book to break barriers” competition.
It was ok. I liked that it was very informal, with some humour thrown in. I quite enjoyed how the author interjected his wife's comments in at various
"In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian–White relations in North America since initial contact..."
I'm
This book should be taught in high school.
The glib sarcasm (which was suppose to be humor) & his abject self appeasing style of writing put me off......
Many (incorrect) historical "facts" were rightly put to death... but I wasn't impressed and I liked "Green Grass, Running Water" by him much better......
The book is more or less a history, but King rebels against his colonizer's mode of doing history - the book is not in chronological order and doesn't really cite sources (although he talks about some of his sources enough that it would be easy to track them down) and blends personal anecdotes and humor with historical facts. It is very much told in his voice, and feels like he's sitting right there telling you about his history. It feels very personal. That makes it easy to feel the personal pain that King feels about centuries of broken treaties and blatantly racist policies.
Despite the conversational style and wry humor, this is not an easy read. It will make you angry and sad. It probably ought to be required reading for all white Americans and Canadians.
Don't read this is you want an objective view of the native history and governance.
This is not your normal history. That Dr King is, first and foremost, a novelist is very apparent in the book. This is not a comment on the validity of the history but on its readability. This is no dry chronological account nor does King pretend to a lack of bias. As he once said in an interview, this is more an argument he has been having with himself for a very long time rather than a conventional history. He writes with passion and anger and not a little humour about the attitudes of the European conquerors towards the First Nations people in both Canada and the United States. It seems like it might have been simpler to write about one country or the other but as King points out Indians don't perceive borders in the same way that whites do and, by juxtaposing the policies of the two countries, it is fascinating to see how similar they have been. Canada has usually been a few years behind the US but we always seem to catch up where the native people are concerned whether it's been the forcible removal of Natives from what was supposed to be their lands by Treaty when the land could be more 'profitable' in other, shall we say, whiter hands or in the rise of residential schools in the hopes of 'killing the Indian to save the man'. And massacres were never as popular in Canada as in the US but our treatment has been just as heinous in many other ways. When Dr King tells of the three young native men who were driven by the police to the outskirts of Saskatoon and left to freeze to death, a story I was previously unaware of, I was saddened but not surprised. The murders of First nations people have rarely raised much hue and cry in Canada.
KIng doesn't completely let Natives off the hook for some of their problems. He questions the rise of casinos as a source of wealth for many of the bands, especially in the US. However, as much as he questions this, he points out that it has been better than some of the other ventures which Natives have entered into with outside corporations, for example allowing some of their land to be used as waste dumps resulting in ecological disasters for the bands. And, at least, the casinos have had positive results in that many of the tribes have used the money to buy up more land ironically in some cases land that was originally theirs before it was taken back by the government for some other purpose.
And, as King makes clear, for the First Nations, it's always about the land, a fact that many people just can't understand. To the European settlers right up to the present, land is just another commodity to be measured not by our connection to it but by its value on the market. In this day and age of climate change versus pipelines and tar sands, this is an important distinction.
Dr King who, by the way, is Cherokee, points out that, although we tend to lump all Natives together, there are, in fact, several hundred distinct tribes with distinct customs and traditions. There are also many distinctions made by the governments of our two countries - legal Indians, Status Indians, non-status, etc and all of these distinctions mean different treatment for the people in each classification. And then there is popular culture which tends to divide Indians between Dead Indians and Live Indians. We tend to love Dead Indians AKA the Noble Savage with their great costumes and headdresses and Pow Wows but live Indians not so much.
I have no doubt this book will cause some controversy. History, or so we like to pretend, is supposed to be unbiased so where are the footnotes, the bibliographies, where is the list of sources. But reality is all history has a bias no matter how dry or source laden. With The Inconvenient Indian, Dr King has just made his history more accessible than most, more fascinating, more readable. In this book, he tells us a side of history too long ignored. Best of all, it's written in such a way that its damn near unputdownable. Definitely a book everyone should read.
A minor niggle: it's always 'the English' in this book, rather than 'the British' when he talks about European settlers/traders (usually in opposition to 'the French'). As many of the early settlers in Canada were Scots (Sir John A. Macdonald, for example), this jarred with me a bit.
The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King - A Curious Account of Native People in North America
My relationship with The Inconvenient Indian changed during the process of reading. It starts out a tongue-in-cheek, humorous, if biting, account of the history
Through recounting seemingly endless points of interaction between the tribes, and Canadian and United States governments, King establishes how the policies and philosophies of whites toward the tribes has never been, nor had any intention of being, an honest encounter between equals.
Whether comparing the process of subsequent treaties, laws, and court rulings with the original agreements or providing actual quotes from the white leaders of the time, military, religious, and political, King shows how the intent from the start was to eliminate native culture from the start by any means possible, legal, indoctrination, assimilation or assassination, to name a few. The book covers the question of dismissing history to begin anew by pointing to court decisions and leases in effect until 2064 that declare such things as land owned by a tribe has half the land value as land owned by white people. The last was set into court documents with no consideration to logic, or recognition of discrimination and bias.
This is an uncomfortable book, more so because it is not about yesterday so much as it is about today and the future, with history showing the underlying causes. It’s about how successive governments in the United Stated and Canada go about controlling the narrative such that my personal experiences with “Live Indians,” to use the term in the book, as a child were superseded by the social push for Dead Indians until college where the clash between the two made me have to reexamine what I knew and what I’d been told. Tell someone, especially a child, often enough that real Indians died out long ago, and it sticks. After all, this was one of the direct methods used to assimilate some of the native population much like the Borg on Star Trek by taking them as children, denying them access to their families, forbidding them from using their native tongues, and putting out good little Americans who, or so one church claimed, were actually lighter in skin tone when the process had been completed.
So, yes, this is an uncomfortable book. It makes you unable to hide behind cultural myth and reveals the reasons behind all the cheating and treaty breaking that had little to do with actual ignorance as much as deliberate willful refusal to consider another perspective might exist and might be just as valid. The choices and decisions of the Europeans back in the very beginning set up obligations modern governments suffer under, or rather, do their best to eliminate while paying lip service to the concept of justice and rights. I’d been living under the belief of sovereign nations, an odd concept in some ways, but if you look at the early Europeans (and modern governments as it turns out) as invaders out to claim resources they didn’t/don’t own, the concept that at least the sovereignty of the natives was maintained is a comfort of sorts. However, that too was rewritten out of the treaties long ago, with it being a promise to “Dead Indians” that modern governments see no reason to maintain against the “Live Indians” who persist in fighting the Borg.
As a historical text, The Inconvenient Indian pushes too many facts and dates, and fails to maintain either local or chronology. But that style works in what is an education in the relations between two groups based on deliberate deceit and lack of honorable intentions from the start. Rather than memorizing the content, the periodic lists of names and treaties offer an deliberate overwhelm to give insight into just how broken both the history and the modern perceptions are. This also leads to a couple places where the repetition stood out as a negative, but overall, I think the narrative style (neither strict history nor memoir) works to strengthen the frustration beneath the factual and humorous accountings.
Oh, and it’s not a total downer. King is happy to point out the times when efforts were made to repair relations, though sometimes the consequences of those efforts did not serve the stated purpose even so.
It’s a complex book, but one I think deserves to be widely read. Until we see beyond the delusions in the North American narratives, we will be unable to engage not just with those on North American soil but with every country and culture across the globe, many of whom see hypocrisy where we see honor (out of deliberate ignorance).
P.S. I received this title from the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.
This is one of those books that is very difficult for me to review, not just because of the story that Thomas tells, but the way he tells it. He doesn't just tell us the history of the people, in fact he tells us that he won't be giving us a history book. Instead, he's
Native American history is a passion of mine and while I'm familiar with the "truth" of both sides and I've visited Indian Reservations and talked and ate meals with the people that lived there and yet...Thomas's anger and way of telling the story still set me back. It made me relook at aspects of my childhood, the movies that I watch, the romantic view I have of aspects of both the Native American world and our world, and reexamine everything. It's a powerful book and one that should be read by many. I give the book 3 out of 5 stars
As I read this book, a little piece of my Canadian Pride was ripped away. It was not really a history, but it gave a history of how the Native Americans