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

In the Prologue to The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King explains how his understanding of his project changed as he was writing the book. Its original working subtitle was A Curious History of Native People in North America, but his wife and son, both historians, convinced him that calling the book a “history” would oblige him to follow scholarly conventions and to adhere to a “delineated chronology.” For King, a novelist, this “delineated chronology” does not accurately reflect how humans experience history. Quoting the poet and critic Ezra Pound, he says:

We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anaesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time (x).

Pound’s understanding of history, then, is not that of the historian but that of the storyteller, and as such it aligns with King’s perspective as a novelist. The book’s final, published subtitle is A Curious Account of Native People in North America. The seemingly trivial difference between history and account functions as a mission statement for the book, as King sets out to write not an authoritative, chronological history but a story—one that narrates the past from the vantage point of the present and from the singular perspective of its author.

King’s approach draws on techniques from fiction—both the literary fiction that is his professional focus and the oral traditions central to many Indigenous cultures—to offer an unapologetically subjective view of history. Many Indigenous storytelling traditions emphasize the role of the past in constructing the present. In the Cherokee culture King belongs to, for example, it is not considered important to name the specific date at which the water spider brought fire to the people; what is important is to understand that “small beings can perform great acts” and to integrate this understanding into the work of communal identity-building in the present (Woods, Stephen. “Cherokee Story-telling Traditions: Forming Identity, Building Community.”). This emphasis on interpretive care—a-ga-se-s-do-di—rather than correctness—go-tlv-hi-s-o-di—links the Cherokee storytelling tradition with the interpretive frameworks that apply to literature as opposed to scholarly history (Woods).