The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King (review)

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 113 MAGGIE WALTER The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King University of Minnesota Press, 2013 THIS BOOK PRESENTS THE NARRATIVE of Anglo-French (but particularly Anglo) colonization , historic and contemporary, of the North American continent. King’s narrative is beautifully written, intelligent, critical, finely detailed, and historically solid, wrapped in personal, personable, and at times ironically humorous presentation. At one level, this is quite a feat. The story of colonization , up to and including the present day, as King demonstrates to great effect, is essentially a continuing tale of mass murder (inside and outside the artifice of war), greed, dispossessing violence, deceit, duplicity, corruption, tragedy, mistreatment, willful indifference, cold-hearted theft, damning contempt , and dehumanization, to name just a few of its pejorative aspects. At another level, the strategy of ironic humor seems to be the only viable option to demonstrate the cognitive dissonance between the acts Euro-­ Americans/Canadians perpetrated (and continue to perpetrate) against the Indigenous populations of North America and their much tended self-image as adventurous, brave, caring, hard-working, industrious, pioneering folk and as nations built on the notions of liberty, egalitarianism, and individual human rights. It is be humorous or be angry, and, as we all know, nobody likes an angry Native. And while the title is The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of the Native People in North America, the book’s subject is actually Euro-­ Americans/ Canadians. It is their story of how they took, and continue to take, the North American continent for themselves, told through the eyes and from the perspective of a Native American. And the question King asks in chapter 9—“What Do Whites Want?”—is the heart of the book. His answer, and one that will resonate particularly with other Anglo-colonized First World Indigenous peoples in places as far flung as Tasmania, Australia, Aotearoa, Canada, and Hawai‘i, is that they want the land. My own margin notes remind me that I first wrote in response “No they want everything.” I then, after a moment’s contemplation, realized that the land is everything; everything is embodied in the land, both to Native peoples and to the dispossessing colonizers. King, of course, was one step ahead and far more eloquent, writing over the next few pages of land as containing the “languages, the stories, and the histories Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 114 of a people. It provides water, air, shelter, and food. Land participates in the ceremonies. And the land is home” (218). As King writes, “Native history . . . has never really been about Native people. It’s been about Whites and their needs or desires” (126). For Euro-­ colonizers, again past and contemporary, land is about power and wealth; it is a commodity that brings riches, prestige, status, and influence. This core ontological disjuncture explains the repeated pattern of the murderous terrain of settler colonialism and the horrific injustices it continues to inflict on Indigenous peoples around the globe. The near genocide of my own Tasmanian people in the 1800s was all about the land. It is still impolite in most Tasmanian circles to raise the topic of the campaign of orchestrated violence, deception, broken promises, and captivity that killed all our old people, but official discourse does refer to these events as “tragic,” as if the events happened all by themselves. But even as they say it, I can hear the nonverbalized additional words “but convenient.” The inconvenient Indian, then, is the nuisance obstacle that must be overcome to garner full possession of the land. Via a wide-ranging critical argument, weaving across time over the ten chapters, King shows the consistencies between now and then, and how it has always been about the land. King artfully casts the net wide across a broad range of topics, such as the restriction of Indian actors or artists to Indian-only roles, preferably ending in 1880; the notion of the dead simulacrum “real” Indian commodified as an exotic product adornment or purveyor of “authentic” experiences; the entity of the “legal” Indian, defined, controlled, and constrained to Indian space, well away from the...