Lindsey Catherine Cornum offers measured praise for Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, writing that “while King’s history is unique in that it is an Indian history actually written by an Indian, it repeats familiar colonial moves—it is still very obviously intended for settlers to read”:
Unlike narratives such as [Dee Brown’s] Bury My Heart, King works to make clear that the injustices of American and Canadian settlement on this continent are not some distant tragedy but a continual process of dispossession and assimilation that continues to the present-day. In general, King is opposed to the word tragedy, perhaps the most common descriptor of Indian history and people. Tragedies are exceptional events, and King pushes the reader to see the injustices committed on behalf of settler governments not as aberrant but necessary to their structure as settler institutions. He presents the catalog of injustices, from the massacres and broken treaties to the residential schools and sexual assaults, but unlike white historians such as Brown, he does not leave them in the past. …
Yet even though King has shown Indians to be more than a collection of past tragedies, there is still very little about his narrative that offers Indians much agency.
King himself notes, “Native history in North America as writ has never really been about Native people. It’s been about Whites and their needs and desires.” It’s unclear whether King is self-consciously describing his own work or not. But most of The Inconvenient Indian is spent exploring images imposed on Indians, laws applied to Indians and horrible acts committed against Indians, and very little on Indian resistance movements. It seems he may have fallen into the same trap. This may be a genuine reflection of what it means to be an Indian. The Indian was born at the moment of contact with whites, and for a long time Indians have been caught in that gaze. King’s book, in fact, recreates some of that gaze to narrate a convenient story to a white audience. But what might an inconvenient Indian do to break from this whiteness and create a truly Indian history?
Reflecting on his book, King summed up his philosophy of inquiry:
Whenever I travel around on book tours and speaking engagements, one of the questions I get asked all the time is, what do Indians want? I’ve never had a good answer for that question, and I must say that this has bothered me. And then one day I realized that it was the wrong question to ask. I realized that if you want to get to the heart of Native/non-Native history, the question you have to ask is, what do Whites want?
His answer? “Land. Whites want land”:
Sure, Whites want Indians to assimilate, and they want Indians to understand that everything that Whites have done was for their own good because Native people, left to their own devices, couldn’t make good decisions for themselves. All that’s true. From a White point of view at least. But it’s a lower order of true. It’s a spur-of-the-moment true, and these ideas have changed over time. Assimilation was good in the 1950s, but bad in the 1970s. Residential schools were the answer to Indian education in the 1920s, but by the twenty-first century governments were apologizing for the abuse that Native children had suffered at the hands of Christian doctrinaires, pedophiles, and sadists. In the 1880s, the prevailing wisdom was to destroy Native cultures and languages so that Indians could find civilization. Today, the non-Native lament is that Aboriginal cultures and languages may well be on the verge of extinction. These are all important matters, but if you pay more attention to them than they deserve, you will miss the larger issue.
The issue that came ashore with the French and the English and the Spanish, the issue that was the raison d’être for each of the colonies, the issue that has made its way from coast to coast to coast and is with us today, the issue that has never changed, never varied, never faltered in its resolve is the issue of land. The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people.
Previous Dish on The Inconvenient Indian here. Update from a reader:
I always looked on America’s guilt over the native Americans as an odd accident of history. Since the dawn of man, tribes have driven other tribes off of their land, killing each other in the process. One can look pretty much anywhere to see this throughout history. The land that makes up Israel has to be the example that most Christians at least know best. How many different groups have come in a taken that land at the point of a sword and killed or driven out the people that were there?
The native Americans were killing each other over land before the Europeans arrived and continued to do so after the Europeans arrived. So why is there so much guilt over it? I’d claim there are two factors. 1) The government that was responsible is still in power. Unlike other places in the world, people can claim that they were always there (they weren’t) or that was several revolutions ago; the current government would never do something like that. 2) It was so one sided. The native Americans never really had a chance. They had no written language(s), not even Bronze Age technology. Their numbers were their only real advantage and even that was diminished by diseases they had no immunity to brought by the Europeans. We cannot even claim that it was a fair fight.
That all being said I’m with Spike on this one:
The Dish 