68 pages • 2 hours read
Thomas KingThe Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Too Heavy to Lift”
Chapter 3 discusses the various ways in which Indigenous people exist in “real life” North American society (53). King argues that there are three types of “Indians”—“Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians” (53)—which he will discuss throughout the chapter.
Dead Indians are fictional representations of Indigenous people that conform to an imagined idea of how Indigenous people exist and behave, assembled from “the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears” (53). King calls these images a simulacrum, comprised of “bits of cultural debris—authentic and constructed”—that represent “something that never existed” (54).
These images of Indigenous people often consist of stereotypical clothing and accessories, like “war bonnets, beaded shirts, [and] fringed deerskin dresses” (54), with little consideration of the “truth” of what these accessories signify or whether the specific Indigenous people being depicted would actually wear them (54). The Dead Indians image can be found throughout American culture and is often used to sell products, such as “American Spirit cigarettes” or “Crazy Horse Malt Liquor” (57). King also notes that real-life Indigenous people often have to dress like Dead Indians if they want whites to accept their Indigenous identity as authentic.
While the image of Dead Indians is often used to market products to white people, most white people tend to outright ignore “Live Indians,” a term King uses to refer to any living Indigenous people in North America. King describes how the history of Indigenous and white relations is one of repeated violence, with Indigenous people being killed in war and by new diseases brought to North America by colonists. As Indigenous numbers diminished, the US and Canadian governments sought to push Indigenous people onto reservations, where they would be “out of sight, out of mind” (61). Programs like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School took Indigenous children and introduced them to “the civilizing effects of Christianity,” with the aim of eradicating their Indigenous cultural identity (62). King argues that Live Indians are “disappointing” to most white people because they fail to conform to stereotypical images of Dead Indians.
The chapter closes with a brief discussion of a category King calls “Legal Indians.” By “Legal Indians,” King means any Indigenous people who are officially recognized as having Indigenous identity by the US or Canadian governments. The concept of a Legal Indian stems from treaties made between Indigenous tribes and the United States or Canada that offer tribal members certain legal rights. However, the complicated process by which one can be considered a Legal Indian means that “only about 40 percent of Live Indians in North America are Legal Indians” (69).
Chapter 4 Summary: “One Name to Rule Them All”
Chapter 4 considers the history of government policies for making land and trade deals with Indigenous tribes. This history is often characterized by violence and disregard for the rights of Indigenous people, with the US and Canadian governments frequently forcing tribes to relocate to other lands. These policies often approached Indigenous peoples with a “‘one size fits all’ mindset” that disregarded the differences between tribes (83).
Early colonial governments understood Indigenous tribes to be “sovereign, independent nations” and often made treaties with them for trading furs or purchasing lands (81). However, around the start of the 19th century, the US government began to see Indigenous tribes as an “inconvenience” that needed to be forced West to allow the United States to grow as a country. A series of Supreme Court decisions—1823’s Johnson v. McIntosh, 1831’s Cherokee v. Georgia, and 1832’s Worcester v. Georgia—severely limited tribal rights. These decisions ceased to treat the tribes as independent nations and set a legal precedent that “reduced [Indigenous people] to the status of children and declared them wards of the state” (82).
President Andrew Jackson signed the Removal Act into law in 1830, allowing the federal government to sign treaties with tribes in the Eastern United States to relocate them to newly purchased land in the West. Such treaties often involved coercion and military action to force tribes to leave their land (87). Numerous Indigenous people died during these forced removals. King argues that the forced removal of the Cherokee from Georgia, known as the “Trail of Tears,” was “the largest massacre of Native people in North American history” (88).
King notes that Canada’s relocation of Indigenous tribes largely began after 1940, when the country sought to expand its industrial sector following World War II. However, Canada had experimented with relocations throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, often forcing tribes to repeatedly relocate as the country expanded. The Canadian government frequently claimed that such relocations were for the good of the tribes, who the government claimed had difficulty “adapting to ‘modern society’” (89). Many forced relocations in the 20th century were to allow for the construction of massive dams, which often had the consequence of “destroy[ing] Aboriginal hunting and fishing resources” (95).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Throughout these two chapters, King explores how cultural stereotypes of Indigenous people starkly differ from the cultures and experiences of living Indigenous people. King charts how these cultural stereotypes obscure Indigenous realities in the eyes of white people, paving the way for detrimental government policies.
In Chapter 3 King describes three different categories of Indigenous people that he believes exist: “[I]n real life we have Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians” (53). “Dead Indians” refers to stereotypical representations of Indigenous people created by white people. These typically combine an amalgam of symbols and images that are associated with Indigenous people but are entirely disconnected from their original meaning or usage. According to King, the Dead Indian “represents something that never existed” and transforms a false image of Indigenous peoples into an authentic symbol in the eyes of white people (54). Images of Dead Indians abound throughout white culture and are often used in advertisements to market products. The danger of the proliferation of Dead Indians is that white people often expect living Indigenous people (whom King calls “Live Indians”) to adhere to this mythic image. King describes how the history of white-Indigenous relations has been to displace Indigenous people and make them “forgotten, safely stored away on reservations and reserves” (61). Ultimately, King argues that “Indians are invisible” to the vast majority of white people (62), who believe that Indigenous culture has died out. In King’s analysis, Indigenous people are only sympathetic to white people when they are symbolic images of a “noble” and dead civilization, whereas actual “Live Indians are invisible, unruly, [and] disappointing” (66).
In Chapter 4 King describes how these distorted ideas of Indigenous culture have led to damaging effects. King uses the term “Legal Indians” to refer to any Indigenous person who is legally recognized as such by the state. For King, the contested status of the Legal Indian is emblematic of The Role of Land in Indigenous-White Relations. He argues that Legal Indians are often seen as a burden or nuisance by white government officials and that the concept of Legal Indians is seen as “one of those errors in judgment that North America made and has been trying to correct for the last 150 years” (69). The concept of Legal Indians stems from early relations between white colonizers and Indigenous peoples, who signed various treaties as they attempted to divide land between them. Early treaties understood tribes as sovereign, individual nations. However, as the US grew and began to imagine its territory spanning the continent, the government began to see all Indigenous peoples as a single obstacle standing in the way of that “manifest destiny.” The law began to use a one-size-fits-all mindset, grouping a multitude of tribes under a single “Indian” identity (83). Such policies deliberately ignored the unique characteristics of each tribe and behaved as though “the differences among Native peoples were really just a matter of degree” (83). Such a unifying outlook would lead the US and Canadian governments to pass legislation with little regard for the needs or wants of individual tribes. For instance, the policy of removal and relocation, discussed in Chapter 4, forced tribes to leave their homelands and move to territories in the West while refusing to recognize the significance of these homelands to their respective tribes. The frequency with which the US and Canadian governments discarded previous treaties with Indigenous peoples stands as the clearest evidence of The Precarity of Indigenous Sovereignty. Even in the present day, Indigenous nations must work to preserve their sovereignty against encroachment by both governments and corporate interests.
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