Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

One of the first things that struck me about Thomas King's famous account of "Native People in North America" is that The Invonenient Indian doesn't particularly take much notice of the border between Canada and the United States. After all this imaginery line is really only that. Imaginery. The people who lived in North America (or Turtle Island as some groups describe it) didn't distinguish between the two nation states that were eventually imposed upon them. This ought to be an obvious point.

But so used are we to thinking about the nation state, that we impose it backward. King's book doesn't make that mistake, though in his history of people he does deal with the different paths that have led to different laws, politics and struggles among indigenous people. He writes "while the line that divides the two countries is a political reality, and while the border affects bands and tribes in a variety of ways, I would have found it impossible to talk about the one without talking about the other."

The second thing that struck me was one of King's comments about the hunt for the correct term for the people of North America. First Nations, Indians, Native Americans. What was the correct phrase to use? "Why do we need one?" he counters. After all these were not a single group of people at all.

The point I got from these initial thoughts was how easy it is to slip into very crude and simple approaches to people that stem from the world we live in today. "Being", Marx said, "determines consciousness". And the modern framework of nation states, imperialism and earlier colonialism still shapes these thoughts. 

Thus King's book is refreshing in that its narrative is not a simple linear one of conquest, defeat and oppression. Though this material is all there - and sometimes it is shocking and unpleasants. Rather it is a discussion of what it means in terms of how Native Americans (for want of a better term) are seen, indentified, protrayed and understood by non-Native Americans today. King uses two categories to explain this, the Dead Indian and the Live, or Legal, Indian. The former is acceptable in a sense, because it is the Indian that lives in the imagination - in a thousand western films, or in books, or on food containers. It is the Native American of fantasy. It is one that can be dressed up as. The Legal Indian is the existing one, who has rights and land and as King says in a reprinted interview at the end of this book, "the Legal Indian is the Indian that Canada is trying to kill. They don't want no more Legal Indians".

Here King touches on the way that the "Legal" indian, with their land and (some) rights is a barrier to North American capitalism. Their land ownership, their legal rights, their reservations stop the profit machine. Here is the "inconvenience" of the title - the fact that Indians have fought for their rights, to defend and extend them - from the Indian Wars to the Wounded Knee Occupation in 1973. Some of the best parts of the book are those where King describes these more rescent struggles - or at least the battles of the 20th century over fishing rights, land access or wealth.

King makes a final, and important, point. He rejects the idea of a static Native American culture, or indeed one that is particularly mystical. Instead he says that "the fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms." Reality means that doing that will mean a constant struggle - against racism, oppression and exploitation. King's book shows that there is a long tradition of that and he does this with verve, passion and humour. Highly recommended.

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